Although he's frequently referred to as The Last Great Surrealist, Jan Svankmajer is ultimately beyond labels. The acerbic little animations this Czech filmmaker has been cranking out since the '60s have morphed over the years into longer and more elaborate projects, making extensive use of live actors (as opposed to the beloved puppets and animated household objects that originally made his rep) — but the results are as mysterious and mordantly funny as ever.
Svankmajer's latest, Lunacy (now available on fully-loaded DVD from Zeitgeist), is an unholy but altogether inspired fusion of Edgar Allan Poe, the Marquis de Sade and Betty Boop, filtered through the gloriously trashy aesthetics of some lurid piece of mid-'70s Euro-cult flotsam. "What you are about to see is a horror film," says Svankmajer by way of introduction, "with all the degeneracy the genre implies."
At this point, what appears to be a large, meaty tongue sashays merrily across the stage, a visual punch line to the director's deadpan monologue. "It is not art," Svankmajer reminds us, "most art being nearly dead today anyway."
What follows is a synapse-popping odyssey through a 19th-century rural France inexplicably laced with superhighways, where everyday articles of clothing spring to vaguely ominous life, and where kinky black masses are routinely interrupted by slabs of dancing meat. Our hero is a frazzled asylum inmate (Pavel Liska, apparently channeling Herzog's immortal mental-patient-cum-actor, Bruno S.), but whether the freak-outs, fantasies and non sequiturs running rampant here are truly his or Svankmajer's or the collective confessions of a culture's deranged mind — well, that's anyone's guess.
If Svankmajer's movies resist labels, the films of Kenneth Anger positively explode them. A groundbreaking iconoclast with a camera (as well as the author of that Rosetta Stone of bitchiness, Hollywood Babylon), Anger is one of the cinema's most legendary figures — and, until now, one of its most underrepresented on DVD.
That all changes with Fantoma's indispensable The Films of Kenneth Anger Volume One, a stunning collection of works produced between 1947 and 1954. Decades ahead of their time, these delirious avant-garde explosions influenced everyone from Andy Warhol to Martin Scorsese to MTV, elegantly fusing the iconography of pop culture with a flamboyant visual sense, a disarmingly open sensuality and a healthy dose of darkling mystery (Anger flirted with Aleister Crowley and all things occult). The hallucinogenic, half-hour Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (featuring a birdcage-headed Anais Nin) is the jewel of this collection, but everything here is a sheer delight.
Fantoma's beautiful set features a host of interesting extras, highlighted by appropriately cryptic audio commentaries from Anger himself (now a spry octogenarian), and a 48-page book complete with full-color photos, meaty insights and a heartfelt introduction by Scorsese. Snatch this baby up now. In fact, buy two copies — all the better to insure Volume Two shows up posthaste.
An appreciation for Anger almost inevitably leads to Jean Genet, the blaspheming bad boy of French literature. Genet only made one movie in his lifetime, 1950's Un Chant d'Amour, but that 25-minute silent film was incendiary enough to get it banned pretty much everywhere in the world for over half a century. The movie has gone largely unseen until just this year, when Cult Epics released a double-disc edition of Genet's legendary masterpiece.
As it turns out, the fuss over Un Chant d'Amour is not completely unjustified. Even in these jaded times, the film possesses the power to shock, and not just by virtue of its sensibility (a provocative eroticization of the theater of cruelty) and graphic imagery — set in a French jail, the movie peeps at prisoners and guards in what might be perceived as an extended sadomasochistic fantasy, punctuated with plentiful male flesh. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all about Genet's film is its ability to communicate such raw material in a manner so strangely dreamlike that it often borders on the sublime.
Un Chant d'Amour defies logic, but the question that logically arises here is "How does a 25-minute film, regardless of its importance, become a two-DVD set?" As it turns out, Cult Epics manages to cram so much fascinating material onto the discs that one suspects a third might have been in order.
The goodies begin with a commentary by none other than Kenneth Anger, who knew Genet in the '50s in Paris and muses on the writer's abiding fascination with killers and outcasts of all stripes. Even more insightful is an introduction by filmmaker/historian Jonas Mekas, who smuggled a print of Un Chant d'Amour into New York in 1964 (with the help of Harold Pinter), arranged a public screening, and was promptly arrested. The frail-looking but ever eloquent Mekas offers an intriguing personal history of the film, which he describes as both a damning indictment of the penal system and "one of the great love poems."
The real treasures here, outside of the film itself, are found on the set's second disc, where we get a pair of feature-length interviews with Genet himself, filmed in the early '80s toward the end of his life. It's a bit odd imagining the kindly old gent being interviewed as Western lit's grand poet of murder and lust, but it's hard not to be charmed when Genet seems genuinely flattered at being called innocent. "It's because," explains the inveterate thief, tough guy and lover of boys, beauty and darkness, "we all know it's the innocent who are truly perverse."
This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2007.