Obscurité, Lumière, Obscurité

"Darkness, Light, Darkness" is a creepy stop-motion film. However, it's not nearly as creepy as many of Jan Svankmajer's other films...that's for sure!

The film begins with a pair of clay hands in a room. The hands seem to have a mind of their own. Soon, other body parts begin to come into this very crowded room--first some eyes, then ears, a head and so on until eventually the entire body is assembled by the hands and crowds the room.

While this doesn't sound like a lot of plot, the film IS highly entertaining. In fact, I cannot recall another stop-motion film I enjoyed more. I think it's because of the amazing quality of the film combined with a sick and bizarre sense of humor that really kept my interest. Not to be missed!!

An inventive, even witty Svankmajer short (lasting 6 minutes) which basically sees the various disembodied components of the human body converging inside a low-ceilinged house(!) on their way to assembling the whole. Sometimes, though, it seems they're not quite sure how it's all supposed to turn out – as ever more organs knock at the door demanding entry; the biggest laugh unsurprisingly involves male genitalia as a very loud thud is heard prior to its (unimpressive) appearance! The claymation effects, naturally, are splendid and the results are delightful and striking enough (even at this modest scale, compared to the feature-length ALICE [1988], to which it's been attached on DVD) to definitely make me interested in checking out more of this celebrated animator's work.

"Darkness/Light/Darkness" is one of the most creative films from Jan Svankmajer, if not exactly his best or most praised work. To be sure, it doesn't carry an underlying meaning as in "Dimensions of Dialogue" and it lacks the story aspect of some of his earlier, less characteristic work, but even despite all of this the short is guaranteed to be perhaps the most memorable one anyone watching Svankmajer's work could imagine. The creativity exercised is remarkable and the craft is brilliant, including the setting and stop motion that is genius and entertaining.

Svankmajer's film basically consists of a body constructing itself from a number of body parts inside what appears to be a doll's house. It's quite enjoyable watching the different parts figure out where they're supposed to go and what the final result looks like. The title seems to be unrelated initially, but thinking about its relative meaning to what's happening in the film, I think it's a reference to the first day in history after God created the heavens and the earth, thus making an allusion to the theme of creation that both the movie and the creation story share. Overall on par with all of Svankmajer's other work and it's no wonder it is so well known.a.

This really cool short film is everything you want from surrealism.

It's bizarre, freaky, but it's not arbitrary. It establishes a simple concept and follows it through with a fetishistic weirdness in every moment.

It's not meant to convey some cryptic message, it just gets it's hands dirty as it delves into the dream like and reshuffles the familiar human body.

his is one of the few short movies where my jaw was dropping almost throughout the entire presentation. I was stunned at what I was seeing, it looked so bizarre. What a genius idea and presentation!

Basically, what we see is a body being put together, putting itself together. It is a claymation (clay animation) film which all takes place in a single room which looks like a big doll house room.

We have only a hand to start, but soon there is a knock on the door and another hand comes in. Then there is a knock on the small window and in flies an ear. Well, actually two ears but molded together looking like a bat or a butterfly. To condense the story, we slowly see an entire body formed. How it's done is utterly fascinating with some things, as I said, that just had my jaw dropping. Some body parts look impossibly big to get through the door,but they manage.

This is very, very clever material and one of the short films I will never forget. It was part of the "Jan Svankmejer: The Ossuary And Other Tales" DVD.