Jan Svankmajer's "A Game with Stones" shows that, even though it was made only three years after his first film, the filmmaker was already beginning to test the boundaries of his creative mind in the different things he could do with stop-motion animation. His first effort, "The Last Trick", utilized stop-motion but was not quite the creepy and surrealistic short most might expect; his second, "Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantastia G-moll" explored the concept of putting animated images to music; and his third, "Punch and Judy" contained little stop-motion but displayed the humorously bizarre mind of the maker. This film, like his second, explores putting music to images as well, but shows development of Svankmajer in that the animation is more complex and the visuals more interesting. It is also a little bit more his standard style compared to his first works.
The set-up is that a bucket - stationed below a clock - catches stones that are released from a small faucet every time the clock chimes. After each succession of stones drops into the bucket, the stones become animated as they dance around, break apart, and form shapes and figures. As another reviewer has pointed out, the style which Svankmajer utilizes to create the abstraction is very polished and quick, giving the short a hypnotic feel, and the music timing with the visual aspect is very well executed. As far as the set-up itself goes, it's a wonderfully entertaining abstraction for what it is, yet not, as others might say, as good as the filmmaker's later works.
