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The Worlds of Czech Animation
JAN SVANKMAJER: THE OSSUARY AND OTHER TALES
JIRI BARTA: LABYRINTH OF DARKNESS
KINO ON VIDEO AND KIMSTIM TO RELEASE TWO COLLECTIONS OF CZECH ANIMATION FROM BARTA AND SVANKMAJER
Kino on Video, extending its successful partnership with KimStim, is honored to announce the release of two anthologies of shorts from the delightful and disturbing realm of Czech animation: Jan Svankmajer's (Little Otik, Faust, Lunacy) The Ossuary and Other Tales and Jiri Barta's Labyrinth of Darkness. While the legendary Svankmajer is no stranger to cineastes in the U.S., his prodigious protégé Barta has never been released in North America until now, making Labyrinth a special cause for celebration. With a pre-book date of August 15, 2006, these two discs will street on September 12. The SRP for each disc will be $24.95.
At a time when computer-generated super-productions have all but usurped hand-drawn animation, the multi-media, richly textured style of Czech animators Svankmajer and Barta is a testament to the potential of gloriously hands-on analogue methods. Very similar in their art, these directors have expanded the very boundaries of "animation" - stop-motion, claymation, cut-ups and puppetry are sometimes employed all at once - to create a truly unique visual language that is diverse as it is idiosyncratic.
It has become all too commonplace to laud artists for creating a wholly autonomous world with each work - but in the case of Czech animators Jan Svankmajer and Jiri Barta, this is truly the case. Initially propelled by a particular thesis or myth, each of their films goes on to make palpably real - and hypnotically unreal � a whole ecology of puppets, humans, animals, and cultural detritus, totally enclosed with an inscrutable logic or drive which governs them. Yet for all their dreamscape ambiguity and purely formal glee, both Svankmajer and Barta also manage to square up the darkest, pre-verbal parts of our minds with our most acutely political and social awareness.
JAN SVANKMAJER: THE OSSUARY AND OTHER TALES
Since his first film in 1964, Jan Svankmajer has created some of the most memorable and unique movies ever made. Animator, poet, sculptor, designer and self-proclaimed "militant Surrealist," his films present a delirious combination of puppets, humans, stop-motion animation and live action.
In this second astounding collection of remarkable short works (following The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer), we see both the more famous face of the Czech genius - macabre puppetry mixed with canonical mythemes, as in Don Juan - as well as pieces that will be a revelation to the casual Svankmajer fan. Johann Sebastian Bach is composed almost entirely of found objects, as cadences of the composers music are echoed in sine waves of chalk on plaster, ripples of paint, or riddled slabs of stone: Svankmajer at his most abstract, and paradoxically, most concrete (at times, literally). Historia Naturae flirts with the taxonomania seen in earlier Peter Greenaway films, as a parade of stop-motion animal genuses are counterpointed with species of classical music compilation. The title film, concerned with an ossuary - a building imbricated with thousands of human skeletons - is a Svankmajer documentary of sorts, with indeed a very bare-boned use of animation proper. For those interested in the full vision of this highly influential filmmaker and its development, this set is not to be missed.
Includes:
The Ossuary, The Last Trick, Don Juan, The Garden, Historia Naturae, Johann Sebastian Bach, Castle of Otranto, Darkness/Light/Darkness, Manly Games
JIRI BARTA: LABYRINTH OF DARKNESS
Revered as one of the world's most significant figures in animation, Czech filmmaker Jiri Barta has made a career fashioning stunningly gothic worlds of horror and fantasy that are infused with sublime humor and intense moral examinations. Mixing the aesthetic traditions of such artists as Gaudi, Kafka, Poe, Fritz Lang, The Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer, Barta's films are wondrous creations that go far beyond mere children�s tales.
His early paper cut-out extravaganzas�Disc Jockey (1980) and The Design (1981)-give way to the object ballet of A Ballad about Green Wood (1983), in which logs celebrate the eternal renaissance of spring. Old mannequins spend their cracked and broken lives in The Club of the Laid Off (1989), and myriad styles of handwear spring to life as a brief history of international cinema in the award-winning The Vanished World of Gloves (1982). Barta's international reputation was cemented with The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1985), a very un-Disney adaptation of the classic German fairytale in which carved wooden puppets in a gothic cubist town are plagued by live rats. Considered one of the greatest works of puppet animation, it recalls the dark medieval epics of Ingmar Bergman. His only live action film, The Last Theft (1987), is a jewel thief/vampire flick shot in the style of 1970s European exploitation cinema.
Working mostly from the prestigious animation studio founded by the legendary Jiri Trnka, Barta's works have been criminally overlooked in the U.S. Kimstim is proud to present all eight of Jiri Barta's films, available for the first time together on one DVD.
Includes:
A Ballad About Green Wood, The Design, Disc Jockey, The Last Theft, The Club of the Laid Off, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Riddles for a Candy, The Vanished World of Gloves
The Ossuary and Other Tales
Czech Republic � 1964-89 � Color/B&W � 127 min.
Directed by Jan Svankmajer
Labyrinth of Darkness
Czech Republic � 1978-89 � Color. � 152 min
Directed by Jiri Barta
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Rodrigo Brandao, Director of Publicity
Kino International
333 W. 39th St. #503
NYC, NY 10018
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