Lunacy [DVD]

In his introduction to the film inside the own film Jan Svankmajer compares modern societies with a lunatics assylum: the subject of " Lunacy " is essentially an ideological debate about how to rule an institution. " Basically there are two ways of managing an institution, and both equally extrem: one looks at the absolute freedom; the other, an old-fashioned based on absolute rules and punishment". But we can find another -he concludes- that combines both of them and " this is the mad- house in we're living today ". As the ptotagonist of the film, as artists nowadays, modern democracies seem to move between two chairs, to walk behind the fog.

Placed in the nineteenth century rural France " Lunacy " is vaguely inspired by a not very popular tale by E. A. Poe titled " The system of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether " about a mad-house ruled by their patients and also by the decadentist and anticlerical criticism of Marquis de Sade. The result is a satirical and thought-provoking horror tale where Svankmajer conjugates cool stop-motion animation, kinky sex, black humour, gothic horror imaginery, disturbing analogies, circular nightmares, therapeutic burials, lunatics and meat puppets to built up a pessimistic political fable about mankind alienation and indecisiviness in industrializied societies.

Another masterpiece of this dark alchemist of the surreal .

It's a joy that two of Svankmajer's past feature films - this and 'Conspirators of Pleasure' - have finally got official UK releases. 'Lunacy' was, to my knowledge, only previously available in region 1, yet here it is at long last.

The film can be divided into two halves. The first half takes place in the shabby grandeur of a marquis' house (who presumably, going by Svankmajer's acknowledged inspirations for the film, is modelled after the Marquis De Sade). Jean, a young man on the way to his mother's funeral, is invited on his journey to spend the night in the Marquis' home - there he witnesses a blasphemous orgy (with plenty of chocolate cake) and an equally mysterious burial. The second half unfolds in a chicken-filled mental asylum where Jean goes to stay voluntarily, hoping to cure his frightening nightmares of being forcibly straitjacketed. Ideas of the conflict between order and reason and liberty and imagination (the latter clearly favoured) are here played out with the asylum as a backdrop - the patients are given free reign of the place, sledding down the stairways in showers of feathers and staging a tableau vivant of Delacroix's 'Liberty Leading the People'. The film is also curiously anachronistic: the extras in the opening scenes are dressed in modern clothing, and pile onto a bus, yet the Marquis is decked out as an eighteenth-century libertine and the main sets are weathered and Baroque; a computer keyboard is placed amid the clutter of an old-fashioned doctor's office.

Svankmajer's trademark stop-motion animation is much more absent in 'Lunacy', when compared to its prominence in his other features such as 'Alice' and 'Little Otik'. Every now and then, at random intervals, short vignettes pop up of chunks of meat cavorting and frolicking to repetitive, carnivalesque music, possibly acting as mirrors of their live-action counterparts. This, of course, only adds to the film's overall oddness, and it is by no means rooted entirely in reality. Hallucinations are mingled with the everyday, and madness is superimposed with presumed sanity. The humour is always morbid, the imagery Gothic and wild, and characters sway ambiguously between being reliable and untrustworthy. Yet this, as always, is part of Svankmajer's charm.

The DVD itself is perfect, in my opinion. I'm no expert on such matters, but I thought the picture and sound quality was flawless, and there's even a short behind-the-scenes documentary showing various aspects of the production. It's fascinating to see Svankmajer at work on-set, interacting with the actors.

Overall, a much-welcomed release. I would urge any fan of Svankmajer's work to get it before it goes out of print, as this generally seems to be the fate of his feature film releases!

At first I baulked, but perhaps not in the right mood. So I tried again. Slow deliberate, loaded with imagery this is an unforgiving film. Not for the squeamish as it curls its way around the nooks and crannies of madness, families and institutions. With dollops of cynical humour it is out of its collective minds.

An emotional intelligence, a tour de force but not in the breadth and scale of Apocalypse Now which when dissected was basically about nothing in particular. This film, slow, ponderous and riddled with displaced tongues, brains, pieces of meat and bones is about everything else. Life, death, sex, madness come under the scutiny of the viewer. The laughing Marquis in Gothic shabbby chic of Mittel Europe ponders on the meaning of callous savagery. The erstwhile hero journeys through his own forms of madness to reach the bitter end.

Foucault's institutions of Discipline and Punish are juxtaposed with freedom. The libertine cries of De Sade and Nietzsche are all incorporated into this gothic tale of emotional horror. No, its not Saw V, with its excruciating attention to torture detail. This is riddled with emotional torture not shlock horror and wrench. This is the small grinds of remembering family bereavement, the power of institutions to dissect and probe, the lack of empathy in every day life, the surging power of madness to debilitate and the institutional power greater in depraved scale and depth than any form of diagnosed madness.

It portrays the manipulation of power within the locked cells by those instructed with the cure. It also enshrines the power of the self fulfilling prophecy.

A fascinating cultural palette, rich in tone. Dialogue is in Czech with English subtitles, so watch on a big screen. This is an old master brought to life; De Sade I meant.