With Feathers

By Stuart Klawans

This article appeared in the August 14, 2006 edition of The Nation.

July 27, 2006

It's wrong to understand a film solely through its maker's words, but since the very substance of Lunacy is error--psychological, physiological, metaphysical, pataphysical--I may as well screw up from the start by quoting Jan Svankmajer's onscreen introduction. He stands before you in a conspicuously empty space, a white-haired, white-bearded man of mournful countenance, and speaks over a faint clatter. It sounds like sprockets passing through a cogwheel. Did the crew fail to muffle the camera's noise? Or is somebody, somewhere, running an old 16-millimeter projector?

"What you are about to see," Svankmajer says, apparently oblivious to the interference, "is a horror film, with all the degeneracy peculiar to that genre. It is not a work of art. Today, art is all but dead anyway." That being the case, "our film may be regarded as an infantile tribute to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, from which it takes certain themes and images, and to the Marquis de Sade, to whom it owes its blasphemy and subversion." As if distracted, Svankmajer looks down at his feet. A severed tongue is creeping energetically across the wooden floorboards, bunching itself like an inchworm. Svankmajer, unfazed, goes on. "In essence, our story concerns a philosophical debate over how best to run a lunatic asylum," or something. Do you think I can write this all down? I know I've botched some of it, but the basic idea is this: While one side in the debate argues for complete freedom and the other advocates control and punishment, either way is better than the method of having both at once, as we do in "the madhouse we live in today."

Having survived two-thirds of twentieth-century Czech history, Svankmajer is entitled to make such judgments. But he's already gone, and in his place we see the hanging carcass of a pig--a very, very long pig--which splits open at the top with a zipping, slurping, ripping sound. Guts spill out in profusion, and as the camera pans down along the pink flesh the gash continues to open, as if sliced by vision itself, while more and more intestines tumble forward in a squiggly pile.

Subscriber Login

4 ISSUES FREE

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

.

About Stuart Klawans

The Nation's film critic Stuart Klawans is author of the books Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order (a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Awards) and Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001. His film criticism and reviews for The Nation won the 2007 National Magazine Award. When not on deadline for The Nation, he contributes articles to the New York Times and other publications. more...
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

Blogs

» The Beat

Bill Moyers Tells a Tale of Two Quagmires: Vietnam & Afghanistan | "Once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it..."
John Nichols
12 Comments
Posted at 9:34 ET

» The Notion

Palin as the Church Lady | Going Rogue book tour brings passive-aggressive rightwing Christianity to the fore.
Leslie Savan
73 Comments

» Altercation

Slacker Friday | The "Second Amendment" sale; the raving paranoids of the right.
Eric Alterman

» Editor's Cut

An Alternative to Escalation in Afghanistan | President Obama is expected to make a decision regarding his Afghanistan strategy after Thanksgiving.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
69 Comments

» The Dreyfuss Report

Chongqing: Socialism in One City | China is managing the most important event in the world: the urbanization of half a billion people. Fast.
Robert Dreyfuss
204 Comments

» Act Now!

Toward Copenhagen | A guide to joining the movement against climate change.
Peter Rothberg
61 Comments