LUNACY

The legendary master of Czech surrealism unexpectedly opens his film with a personal appearance in which he tells the audience what to expect in the next two hours: a “philosophical horror film” based on motifs from Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade. Švankmajer, who is famous for his animated films, breaks up the action of his live characters with animated sequences of frantically jerking pieces of bloody, raw meat. Alongside these drastic images of the way of all flesh, which are frightening indeed – for vegetarians if for nobody else – the tale unfolds of Jean Berlot, a young man afflicted by nightmares in which two lunatic-asylum wardens are trying to force him into a strait-jacket. He accepts an offer of therapy from an evidently 18th-century gentleman named Marquis, but soon loses confidence in the healing powers of a man who holds black masses in his castle, hammers nails into a . gure of Christ, and delivers blasphemous tirades against God and everything under the sun. Berlot’s attempts to flee eventually do take him inside a hospital. He pretends to be one of the patients, since they are at liberty to move about as they please, whereas the head doctors – reduced to tarred-and-feathered monster-like figures – are languishing in a cellar, watched over by the Marquis and his assistant. Berlot manages to free the hospital director, but this good deed ultimately turns against him. Švankmajer, who suffered under more than one regime in the course of his life, depicts rulers – whatever their political colours – as cynics, and hints that life itself is a horror from which there is no escape.