BSA 206 W14 : Jan Svankmajer and Terry Gilliam

This week we looked at the filmmakers Svankmajer and Gilliam, these two share the trait of putting our visually stunning and thematically dark films that often places story and structure second. They are both describes as making surrealist content.

1) Jan Svankmajer 

This Czech filmmaker is known for his dark take on fairy tales and unique visual style.


His first feature was a dark adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, making use of his stop-motion and puppetry expertise to give the surreal world an eerie and unreal quality.




His most famous work is his adaptation of Faust:



This is a really cool clip not just showing the surreal stuff in the film but also a part of it that moves the plot forward, this is the scene where Faust summons the Devil, and the surreal things that continue to unfold fit with the context of the scene.

 I actually really like the filmmaking as well, even without the special effects the scene has a texture and tone that adds a lot to the overall experience. The zooms and close-up panning shots are great, without the stop motion and puppetry elements the scene is already eerie - a rare good example of a summoning demons scene that is genuinely unsettling.

I can see why this is so highly regarded, this clip here is very entertaining and even manages to build anticipation well for the eventual visit by Mephistopheles.

His retelling of Pinnochio looks really cool as well:



The baby is not shown in a very flattering light here and represented more as just a tree stump, again he does a great job of creating anticipation around the supernatural. Here the appeal is the Pinocchio character himself (Otik) and seeing it is both intriguing and unsettling. I love the idea of having it be a horror approach to the tale and of the clips I've seen this is the film of his I'm most interested in watching the rest of.

Faust looked really cool as well, I am definitely interested in this man's work and wish to explore it more.

His retelling of classic fairy tales is like Disney did with his and how he made them marketable again, but it is also highly reminiscent of the more recent Disney remakes, where they attach directors not usually considered family friendly to make their films. This is supposed to add a new texture and depth to the classic films, but doesn't always work. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland definitely had this in the visual department, Guillermo Del Toro was supposed to remake Pinnochio but creative differences resulted in that project not going forward. Del Toro is now making his own Pinnochio, which I am very excited to see, but in some way I feel like we already have our dark Pinnochio retelling with Little Otik, it's just that no one knows about it (a shallow assessment since Del Toro intends to change the themes and stuff a lot with his film, point still gotten across though).

Somehow Svankmajer went relatively unknown to the general public, I myself have never heard of him, and he has not at all gained the same level of fame as Gilliam:

2) Terry Gilliam



Gilliam is someone that I am very aware of and have seen quite a number of his films, I've even read some of his auto-biography. I really like the man, he's a filmmaker who made his debut with Monty Python - as part of that Troupe. His visual origin can be seen in the opening titles for those films, but soon he spun off to make his own movies where he found success in equal parts that he did failure.



To be honest more often than not Gilliam gets fucked by the studio and industry, but somehow he still manages to make his odd and offbeat movies, with him just having released the long awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018).



I've always thought his movies are fun and entertaining, the filmmaking being just as visually enjoyable as the designs or effects, but they have a strange pacing and narrative structure that I find makes them often times feel long and not as engaging as they potentially could be. A type of consistent stimulation that tires the brain.

I always think some of his movies (like Brother's Grimm and Doctor Parnassus) are good, but could be much, much better if more attention was paid to character and story. But still they are very entertaining films and wonderful to watch, in some way I guess Brother's Grimm is his own dark fairy tale.



The Gingerbread mud-monster is very similar to Sankmajer's work, although this film's CGI hasn't aged nearly as well. Honestly would have made it much  better if this was stop motion.

I have far from watched his entire library, but wish to do so, as they are always original, entertaining and worth the watch.

His biggest and often considered best film is Brazil (1985) which I think gained its acclaim because it is pretty much unfiltered Gilliam. It's a type of bureaucratic, dystopian nightmare that I really enjoyed, although it was admittedly a tiring film to watch.



A very inventive film filled with social commentary, definitely want to give it another watch some time.

3) Jan and Terry

The two met for an article in 1997, here the the link for the interview, quite an interesting read:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/when-jan-met-terry-1278032.html