A master of the macabre

Following on from my digression a week or two ago about stop-motion, I shared with one of my Film classes the other day this grimly hilarious 1992 trilogy on 'Food' - my favourite piece of work (the most accessible, and straightforwardly funny - though still very dark, and with onion-skin layers of socio-political allegory) by the Czech experimental film-maker Jan Švankmajer, known particularly for his wonderfully bizarre stop-motion animations, many of which use the stop-motion technique with live actors. I wonder what it is about the Czechs that so draws them towards such dark and surreal satire? Kafka, Čapek, Hrabal, Havel - they all have this affinity for the twisting the everyday into something dreamlike and macabre.

One of my students told me a couple of days later she felt traumatised by this. I hope she was joking! (Well, I half-hope she wasn't joking. We allow teenagers their self-dramatising overstatements... but you kind of want students to be deeply moved by things, sometimes indeed disturbed, discomfited, distressed. I feel my recent spell of looking at World War One poetry with my English class was something of a failure because, although the children read the poetry eagerly and made lots of tie-ins with what they'd studied of the period in History... nobody cried... or got angry... or threw up. If you can read poems like Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' or 'The Sentry' without needing to run to the bathroom, you haven't really read them. But I digress.)

Anyway, here - for 'a bit of fun' is Švankmajer's Food - Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.


Breakfast comes from a 'vending machine'....

At lunchtime, a well-heeled businessman and a poor student share a table in a restaurant, and grow impatient as the waiter keeps ignoring them.


And for dinner a rather posh gent lovingly prepares for a solo feast. So many condiments!



Has that built up your appetite??

Thought for the week

"The obscure we see eventually; the completely obvious takes a little longer."

Scream, and scream again

For our Parent-Teacher Conference last weekend (it's an even bigger deal for us than it is for most schools, since our parents are all flying several hundred miles or more to visit us), I put up in my classroom as a conversation piece this picture of the ill-fated 'Private Wilhelm' - who gave his name to the scream that has become one of the most famous vocal effects in cinema history (already mentioned on this blog a couple of months ago); indeed, in recent decades it has become an industry in-joke, re-used endlessly.

Tristan Wong was the only one of my Film students to guess the picture's significance. Today he shared with us in class this amusing compilation of some of the many on-screen deaths this effect has been used for. (There are a number of others on Youtube too.)

This is a rather more comprehensive round-up that includes many earlier uses of the effect in the '50s and '60s (several in giant ant shocker Them!, which scared the bejesus out of me when I was about 8 or 10, one of my favourite early horror film experiences). Amongst these you can see the original Private Wilhelm moment in the 1953 Western The Charge at Feather River - not killed, at least, but receiving a very nasty arrow wound right through his thigh (if he's an American cavalry trooper, why is he in civilian clothes here? I've never seen this movie!), and the original original moment (the effect was first created for a scene of a man getting eaten by an alligator in the film Distant Drums a couple of years earlier; but for some reason it became permanently associated with its next incarnation as the Ooooh, that hurt! screech of poor Wilhelm).


And here's a nice potted history of the Wilhelm Scream by veteran Hollywood sound man Steve Lee (who curates the Hollywood Lost & Found blog and Youtube channel), in which he reveals that a popular singer named Sheb Wooley is the likeliest candidate to be the creator of the sound.

No 'thought' this week?

Well, NO - sorry, I forgot.

What with the big Parent-Teacher Conference this last weekend and what is - even by our eccentric standards - an exceptionally 'non-standard' week this week (we have two 'field trips' and a homestay weekend lined up, and our normal timetable has been re-jigged to compensate for a lot of 'lost' Saturdays recently...), there just hasn't been an opportunity either to post my weekly 'bon mot' here, or to write one on my whiteboard (the more important display site), as I usually do.

'Normal service' will be resumed next week.

How to play fast

I was just having an end-of-study-unit discussion with one of my Film classes about what they could have done better, especially in their 'Process Journal' blogging, and was tossing around some examples of the technical film-making expressions I would have liked to have seen them making more use of. One that came up was stop-motion - one that most of them were, thankfully, familiar with (although distinguishing the term from time-lapse presented a bit of a challenge).

Alvin Au offered this nice example of the former: the 'Mystery Guitar Man' performing Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee.... over the course of a number of days! (I wonder if he can actually play it at full speed?)

Thought for the week

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

This year's Halloween Micro-Fiction winners

This year my Library Committee decided to run a reprise of last year's successful Halloween Micro-Ghost Story (write a creepy tale in 50 words or less! - although we weren't terribly strict about the word limit).

I announced the winners and handed out prizes at Assembly this morning. All well worth a look. But don't read them too close to bedtime.....

Thought for the week

"The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life.

Try to be Shakespeare; leave the rest to fate!"