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??

A little bit of Zen

As a child, I developed a great fondness for the Czech writer Karel Čapek, a marvellous fabulist and wit (I particularly liked his collection of outlandish re-imaginings of famous moments in history, Apocryphal Tales). Today, alas, his work is falling into obscurity, but he has attained enduring fame as the begetter of the term 'robot' for a humanoid mechanical servant (although he would generously acknowledge that he got the idea to use this word from his elder brother Josef, a painter).

Gardening was one of Čapek's great passions, and he wrote a rather oddball book about it - which includes perhaps my very favourite piece of his, a prose poem called 'How To Grow Clouds'. A few years ago, I discovered online a delightful piece of visual poetry inspired by this piece, a stop-motion animation by a young Polish art student, Alicja Cioch (you can read about the process of making the film on her blog here, and also see some of her charming original storyboards for the project).

How to grow clouds
It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds. Probatum est.
Karel Čapek (1890-1938), translated by Andrew Malcovsky

Whenever somebody asks me for my 'philosophy of teaching', I direct them to this.

How language changes

A colleague tipped me off to this a week or two back - an amusing animated canter through 'The History of the English Language' from the UK's Open University. The narrator (also, I suspect, the author of the piece) isn't credited on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure it's Clive Anderson.

I think I might use this in the mini-class I have to do next week for a visiting group of Year 9 students from our parent school in Hong Kong.

Three dark treats for Halloween

Well, my school's on its mid-term break at the moment, so we won't be indulging in any festivities here on the day itself, but.... I shared this trio of creepy short animations with my English classes just before we broke up for the holiday last week.

The first is Alma, by Rodrigo Blaas - just recommended to me by a couple of young colleagues who teach Spanish. (Alma is evidently the name of the little girl protagonist [well, it's a cutely androgynous character; I had thought it was meant to be a boy!], but also - and significantly, I suspect - the Spanish word for 'soul'.)

That reminded me of Paul Berry's 1991 classic The Sandman, (inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann's story Der Sandmann).

And finally, I couldn't resist adding this early project from animator Dony Permedi (whose Kiwi attracted a lot of attention on the Internet a few years ago) - Pony, one of most truly disturbing comedy shorts I've ever seen. Mr Permedi has a very dark sense of humour - much in keeping with my own!