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| From http://i2.listal.com/image/productsus/1000/B000077VS5/movies/otesanek-little-otik.jpg |
Dir. Jan Svankmajer
Czech Republic-Japan-UK
Film #13, of Saturday 13th October, for Halloween 31 For 31
With this Czech director Jan
Svankmajer makes his third mark on the blog, making him an immediate candidate
for a Hall of Fame or Mount Olympus of the Region Incognito site. Adapted from
s Czech fairytale called Otesánek, this is an odd choice at first to include in
a Halloween festival were it not for the fact that, as with a lot of fairytales
themselves, its macabre take on childbirth and human attitudes is equal to the
nasty interpretations horror stories make of reality. The husband of a
childless couple digs up a tree root that vaguely looks like a child and
presents it to his wife as a gift, only for her to start treating it as an
actual child. The tree log, dubbed Otik, becomes a living being, but is
constantly hungry to the point that it starts eating other living beings within
the apartment the couple lives in.
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| From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/little-otik/w448/little-otik.jpg?1289443833 |
This, on another viewing, is
probably not recommended viewing for expecting or pregnant mothers and possible
readers of this blog and in hindsight may have a different effect on female
viewers than to male ones. Otik is transformed into a literal child – its movements
at first created from pieces of wood of certain shapes connected together like
building blocks to ‘animate’ him, later through puppetry and costumes made from
wood – but also a manifestation of both chaos and the id to just consume
anything without ever feeling full. Pot after pot of baby food, meat, maybe
even a postman, Svankmakjer plays up the horrifying nature of childbirth and
how parents have to look after babies. The daughter of a neighbouring family in
the apartment Alžbětka, who studies textbooks on sexual dysfunction hidden
under the covers of fairytale stories, is obsessed with the concept of
childbirth and having a friend to play with, making her a main character
throughout the film when the peculiar Otik catches her attention.
The film tackles serious adult
issues in its blackly humoured tone, and as with Svankmajer’s other work as a
proclaimed Surrealist creator, he does not hold back in terms of content, invoking
implied cannibalism, matricide and patricide, and following on after the Tokyo Zombie (2005) review, an old man
who ogles Alžbětka from afar and is called a ‘paedophile’ by her at one point. Unlike
Tokyo Zombie, Svankmajer’s take on
such a controversial subject, like the rest of his work, is barbed and forces
you to think about it as it is depicted in such a confrontational way through
the animator’s mind. The film is as much about the apparent ‘normality’ of the
people living around Otik as it is the wooden child, Alžbětka’s mother
constantly afraid of the outside world because of news stories on the
television, and her father drinking constantly and sitting in front of said TV
as biased ads for meat steaks say that their competition’s product is ‘full of
worms’. The absurdity of human life, and the most sacred in childbirth and childrearing,
is upfront as Otik’s hunger is more insatiable and he starts growing in size. That
the original fairytale is told during the film, in beautiful two dimensional
animation, and reveals what the ending will turn out to be signifies this; as
with almost all adaptations of stories, it will stay the same but it’s how they
go to it which is of more importance.
As is the case with Svankmajer,
the animation and puppetry effects are a masterclass and a deep creative well
of images and ideas. Using wood and tree matter extensively, his trademark of
using textured material is emphasised in a character in Otik, who is a living,
almost sweet, creation, but is also unbelievably alien and off-putting at the
same time, constantly crying for food, and gesticulating and spasming with its
branch limbs and ever changing mouth with teeth and a single eyeball within it
to glace at its next meal. This film also puts one of Svankmajer’s most
obsessed about topics, food and the act of eating, within the centre of a
feature work. His cinema is a food – cinema of goulash, cinema of stew, cinema
of soup, cinema of meat and vegetables – but while the food is lovingly
rendered on screen in close ups, likely to cause the viewer (like myself) to
hunger for Svankmajer’s interpretations of such dishes to be available in their
kitchen, said close-ups also make their liquid-solid, sauce rich matter
disgusting as well or too rich for the eyes and thoughts you have of them to
handle let alone the stomach. It reminds me as I write of what Vincent Price’s character
in The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)
(Review Here) must have felt when he could only consume the most plain of substances. In
such detail, and with soundtracks full of slurping, crunching and the sound of
the human gullet and mouth chewing and ingesting food, it both reveals in the concept
of eating but sees (and feels) how disquietingly strange such a primal concept
(to nourish oneself) is. While I may have brought this up in another review of
his work, Svankmajer’s history of dietary problems as a child, and the attempts
to correct it by his parents and doctors, is a piece of autobiographical
information that explains so much about this obsession. Otik consumes for the
sake of food, not just as sustenance, but of the concept of consuming any other
matter for whatever metaphorical reason, without desires of normal morality and
codes of the people in the apartment block have, but just to fill its little
wooden belly. Eating as an aggressive act, as in most of his films especially
the 1992 short Food, but also
admitting how meat, sauce, dumplings and creams are all as much surrealist
materials to play with as Salvador Dalí put boiled beans in his paintings or
was inspired to create his famous melting clock motifs from melting Camembert cheese. Bread shoes, lobster
telephones, the Surrealists played with the motifs of food, but Svankmajer
would also subvert the concept of eating itself as well amongst the other thought
lines and interests in his work, existing in most of his short and feature work
but directly part of Little Otik.
The availability
of the film is problematic in the United Kingdom. Most of his cinematic output
has been thankfully put on DVD on some point or another, this year especially
thanks to New Wave Films, but if it can be located by you the reader, including
non-British readers, in some way it is quite a good start into Svanmajer’s
work, balancing his live action filmmaking with animation, with a story that is
dark and adult but has a clear narrative through its fairytale origins that
eases new viewers into it. It is certainly a film that suits the Halloween
season more than some actual horror films, its gruesomeness at times undercut by
prompts to question and learn from the gristly eating onscreen. Even if he
believes in pure imagination as the most important tool of creating his work,
Jan Svankmajer especially in his feature work always leaves critiques and
distortions of conventional society throughout them, prodding one to question
its validity against the animated creations of wood, bone, toys and even meat
and preserved animal parts, that have been given as much life on-screen as the
puppet-like actors.
[Note: My apology for the pop-up that appears in at the start of the trailer. Thankfully it does not disrupt the rest of it.]
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