Flora

Reviewing a film that is only 20 seconds in length is a real challenge. What could you pick a part and criticize about only 20 seconds of filmmaking? Well, not much, but it's still a film that I'd highly recommend, and a film that I find to be greatly interesting, and pretty disturbing in one way or another. There's something about the imagery, atmosphere, and sound effects that create a really uncomfortable short.

I also must mention the lovely animation that I found to be, especially, appealing. Like most Svankmajer films, it's all stop motion, and it looks great. the film may be extremely short in length, but that doesn't mean that there wasn't a lot of hard work put into its production.

The final shot of a glass of water was surprisingly bleak, and makes the short feel depressing. This is one really strange and powerful film, and it's only 20 seconds long.

What Jan Svankmajer was going for when he created "Flora" seems to be largely a mystery. The film is not even a minute (only 30 seconds) has no title card introducing it, but merely consists of an animation of a person made out of fruits and vegetables in the process of decay. The craft seems polished enough, but it still seems that the film is unfinished, a scrap of animation Svankmajer later published by itself that may have been part of a larger project. Either that or it was merely an exercise in timelapse - although a rather solid one at that. Granted, it's hard to really judge something like this, but it is unique and interesting...even if hardly something one would show another as an introduction to the work of this Czech master.

You've heard an incapacitated person described as a vegetable? Well, what if the person in question was made of vegetables? That's the case in Jan Švankmajer's "Flora". Less than a minute long, it shows a person whose body literally consists of plant-based food, all rotting away. He's becoming a double vegetable! Maybe it's about what eventually happens to us all, or maybe it's just Švankmajer's regular surreal cartoon. Whatever the case, it's a neat one. I've liked every Švankmajer cartoon that I've seen, and this is no exception. Cartoons do not have to be cute stuff for children at all. One can easily see how his work influenced Terry Gilliam. Czech it out indeed.

This is probably the shortest of the Jan Svankmajer short films- and by short it's comparable to the Stan Brakhage shorts that run about the length of a red light- but it's one of his very best. It's about a guy strapped to a bed, a man made up of a lot of vegetables and things, who quickly decomposes right in front of his extremely horrified eyes. It's about this in just visual terms, and brilliantly relayed like one of those horror-show PSA's for drugs, but it's also about mortality. A visceral reaction is the only way to go with this, and you can feel your skin crawl in these mere seconds of the vegetables turning into white-hot maggots and the man's eyes turning into mush. It's one thing to try and describe this to you, but to see it by Svankmajer and his crews' hands are another. Flora is a quick-shot of animation adrenaline to get you feeling for a moment how creepy it really is to decompose.

Jan Svankmajer is the most unusual stop-motion filmmaker whose work I have seen. Instead of the typical models which are brought to life using this method, Svankmajer takes everyday objects or creepy stuff he's found, perhaps, in antique shops to create films that are truly unique.

Each time I see one of his films, I think I've finally seen his most bizarre and disturbing work. Well, I felt this way again when I saw "Flora"--a very, very short and possibly incomplete film from 1989. It consists of lots and fruits and vegetables all lined up like they are part of a person' body--with a clay head and feet. Very quickly, the food begins rotting and is eaten up by worms--all at a highly accelerated speed. I really am not sure what this all meant, but I said above, it's disturbing to say the least. Probably best for die-hard fans of the man's work.