Surviving Life [DVD]

the most beautiful , moving and emotionally charged work of surrealism ever made. A deeply humane story, and a tour de force of animation.

Tongue in cheek, slobbering on the frame, the film is a graphic unpeeling of the human skin layers, to peep into the dank fantasy world inhabited inside a head. Drawing on leitmotifs-the small Czech flats, food that could be edible or just evicted goo, snakes coiling as a penis', worlds rendered as perennially falling apart; populated with slobbering sex, gaps in age, beauty in decay- fluttering within the composed mind frame.

Ideas drawing me back to Monty Python and Vision On, but then it takes a detour into an adult head space falling as a steep descent, stopping to pick up random snippets of burbleage as Jung and Freud overhear the varied conversation of a man entering the last third of age, wanting to turn back the clock and return to a half remembered beauty residing inside his memories. As you get older these layer within the thoughts. Outside the world appears ugly whilst in a composed world he builds the dreams to become more real.

An en-gross-ing film, deeply unsettling in its incisive molar attack- rank humorous, full of emitted bile, vividly lucid and hotly feverish- it leaves an unsettling acidic leather after taste in the mouth.

Finally it shifts a pitch into the mind cupboards where love, memory, parentage and trauma finally infuse within half remembered fragments, as it slithers into shards. Deeply uncomfortable, a boy entrapped within a fevered understanding of how people compose themselves within the present, derived from half remembered and suppressed debris, that pop up when half awake. It leads back like a coiling whodunnit to the original conception and the first five years of surviving life.

Revealing a mother trapped in depression and a father bent on drinking himself into violence, now there is the title for a book.

Moves beyond the previous depictions of Svankmaker to take a step beyond lunacy, this is just an outward pose- to range a full scale attack on reality, based on very simple observations that appear as endless Russian Dolls, where the seeker finds doors of emptiness locked within pouring cascades of desire, forever locked within.