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??