The Dung Beetle is late, the Parasite is asleep and Mrs Larva is more interested in her knitting than the director’s instructions. It’s clear: this amateur theatre company has a long way to go before they can perform their version of "The Insect Play", a famous satirical work from 1922 by the brothers Karel and Josef Čapek which features insects with decidedly human traits: greed, egocentrism, jealousy.
Insects, 人間變蟲記, 벌레, 蟲, 昆虫物语, Owad
Netherlands
International Film Festival Rotterdam
South Korea
Jeonju International Film Festival
China
Shanghai International Film Festival
Czechia18+
Slovakia
China
Czechia
Netherlands
Slovakia
South Korea
[7]
This latest (and reputedly final) film by Czech master Jan Švankmajer has received a rather tepid reaction on the festival circuit since its debut earlier this year at Rotterdam. I realize I have my own biases, but sometimes you gotta let the Old Masters have the run of the asylum and then just sit back and learn from the results.
This is a meta-meta-literary adaptation of Pictures from the Insect Life by the Čapek brothers -- itself, as the film explains, a tepidly received text in its own time. Insect finds Švankmajer simultaneously exploiting his stock in trade, the stop-motion animation that made him world famous, and minimizing it, giving pride of place to a group of actors who…
Less striking but no less idiosyncratic, charming and offbeat than the rest of Švenkmajer's filmography. If this is his final statement, well, it's by no means his masterpiece, but it's a plenty satisfying finish. Maybe a bit cute, but always in a pleasant way- never cloying. The behind-the-magic editing is always good for a laugh, and it's a delight to see the master at work. Sure it's slight, but far from disappointing. Costume designer Veronika Hruba deserves a medal.
...and a bit of verse for National Poetry Month:
If
This
Is Jan's
Final film
There are far worse ways
For a true master to bow out.
(as seen on Vimeo, since I was a contributor)
Well, was it worth paying 25$ years ago? Yeah. Surely Insect is a unique vision by a unique mind, and it is sad to see that this is where it all ends. But see we must.
What happens here is Svankmajer simultaneously reaching inside and out of "art" (define it yourself). The inner mechanics are simple enough, and they have often been employed: we are shown an act within an act. A sort of "push".
This act slowly takes over the world of the actors: dead insects live again, roles are immersed in, actors became what they were only supposed to pretend to be. The world of the play is, it…
As with his previous film, Surviving Life, Jan Švankmajer begins his final film with an apology. The film, he says, means nothing. He wrote the script in one sitting in the 1970s, during his government-imposed exile from film-making. He barely thought about what it meant, because he didn't really care. It was a story - that was enough. He disavows the idea that art has to have a moral, or a meaning, and refers to his actors as no different from the puppets and paper cut-outs he used to animate. There will be, he says sternly, no psychology in this film.
Obviously the main effect of this speech is to make you suspect the opposite. Even before Švankmajer's address is…
🦗➡️ My first work with Jan Svankmajer.
A documentary film where we observe the hard work of the director and his team to recreate surreal moments and be amazed by his ideas.
Metafiction and insects.
----------------------------------------------------------
🦗➡️ Mi primera chamba con Jan Svankmajer.
Una peli-documental donde observamos el arduo trabajo del director y su equipo para recrear momentos surrealistas y quedarnos asombrados con sus ideas.
Metaficción e insectos.
الفيلم دا محتاج الشركة الألمانية لإبادة الحشرات بس كده
انا مش بتقرف بسرعة من الحاجات دي بس الفيلم نفسه خرا يعني
A stripped-down and idiosyncratic cap to a true master's filmography, Insect is decidedly the most quaint, playful and indulgent of all Svankmajer's features.
Its narrative is totally caution-to-the-wind, a realisation owed to the fact that the story was written in a single sitting in the 70's, charged by a govermentally-enforced ban from filmmaking. Jan claims it's just a story, without psychology, meaning; something that subsists only on immoral reason, a half-thought idea, and the likely amalagms of filmographic dreams threatening to split his sides.
He says it himself:
There will be no psychology in this film
This misinformation is not new for Svankmajer. He addressed Surviving Life in the same sly fashion- a narrative centered about the mythic King Oedipus,…
El trabajo final de Jan Svankmajer, su gran adios, no es más que un modesto ejercicio de cine-teatro que más que intentar decir algo grandioso, cambiar el mundo, dejar un legado, solo busca mantener activa la creatividad con la menor cantidad de dinero posible, de manera que todos los involucrados se pudieran divertir un poco. Doblemente Meta, Insect tiene tres niveles narrativos, el primero Jan Svankmajer hace su última película, el segundo, su película consiste en unos actores ineptos que intentan emular una obra de los 20's y tercero, la obra siendo ensayada una y otra vez, fracasando ante los ojos del director y actor guía del segundo plano narrativo, triunfando a los ojos de Jan Svankmajer en el primer…
Švankmajer I adore you, your philosophy on filmmaking and your wonderful films, but this is just not as up to snuff as your other works. Really wish I liked the film within a film within a film design you chose to create here. It was an idea that reminded me of some of Dušan Makavejev's work such as Innocence Unprotected, but ultimately the execution was such that I felt taken out of the experience constantly. I know the point was to make it a meta film about filmmaking but it felt too jarring for me. Still, this film was filled with lovely Švankmajer cuts and eccentricities and that's always a delight to see.
This is not the first time Svankmajer has played around with a dialectic of contradiction between narrative and production, a theme that mostly annoys me, but at least in Faust we are spared the technical details of how the puppets are made to move, how the clay is shaped, etc etc. Insect is operating on three layers of text — the film itself, the inept theater play within the film, and then shots of the director at work or giving interviews like a DVD extra — and all of them are tedious. My interest in Svankmajer’s absurdist humor has always come second to my interest in his craft, which he gleefully deconstructs here in the service of the former. I realize a…
If this is a messy and lopsided cap to brilliant filmography, who's really complaining when we have fifty years of other material to revisit? Svankmajer, at this point, has earned the right to just play around with process and highlight the technicalities of animating giant dung balls and mixing the right consistency of vomit for comedic effect anytime he wants.
I fell asleep halfway through this and I'm glad I did to be honest. I wish I'd fallen asleep sooner.
