Il barone di Münchhausen

Karel Zeman was a genius if visual artistry. His playful use of 19th century engravings in a live-action movie is so original and it works so well. Everybody who praises the Gilliam's Munchhausen should hold the judgement until he sees this Munchhausen. If anybody from the video industry watches this database, please make this movie available at least on VHS. And once you are at it, I would add two more Zeman's films that are made with the same charm, technical wizardry, nostalgia and artistic vision: Vynalez zkazy (1958) ("The invention of Destruction" in English) and Blaznova kronika (1963) ("The Fools' Chronicles"). In the chronological order, I consider the three films a loose trilogy that uses the esthetics of the 19th, 18th, and 17th century, respectively, to study the timeless human situation.

It begins with cosmonaut Rudolf Jellinek landing on the moon. He follows footprints which lead him to the gentlemen of Jules Verne's expedition. They introduce him to their seniors on the site: Cyrano de Bergerac and the Baron Munchausen. Munchausen takes the Moon Man (for so he must be) on a trip to the Earth in what appears to be the 18th century. There they rescue the fair princess Jana Brejchová from the Sultan of Turkey and go on a series of imaginative adventures.

It must have been a dangerous movie to produce in Czechoslovakia in 1962. It celebrates imagination. It's not even imagination in the service of anything except itself. It's the imagination of a boy, just looking up from his loved library of Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas and noticing girls for the first time. The set designs reinforce this. They look like Dore steel engravings, and the stock is toned, occasionally for what seems to be early two-strip Technicolor, with flashes of bright colors. Munchausen fights ten thousand bashi-bazouks; he flies about on cannonballs and dwells in a whale for months. He does whatever he pleases, as the fancy strikes him, and Jellinek follows along. Will he ever develop an imagination of his own?

It's clear to me that Terry Gilliam mined this movie extensive for his own MUNCHAUSEN; there are too many settings and incidents for it to be otherwise. He would have been 24 when it premiered in the US at Pacificon. I have no doubt that he saw it there and it left an impression in his mind at least as great as in my own.

One of the most imaginative, faithful, haunting versions of Munchausen ever. Zeman was a genius that no one seems to remember. A masterpiece of live action and stop motion using Doré's etchings as a springboard.

The fact that this movie hasn't ben resurrected and distributed (on video at least), is a true tragedy. I haven't seen it for years, but I'll never forget it. Just stunning.

By now, nearly everyone should be familiar with the Munchausen story or, at least, some portion of it even if shi didn't grown up on these German drinking boasts which got way out of hand.

This is not the first or last treatment of the braggart Baron, but this version has a charm that many others lack.

The film is shot, predominantly in sepia tone with occasional bits in exaggerated color for artistic emphasis. Those who recall the pink coat in Schindler's List will have some idea of what is happening. But, in this case, the effect is not so much an attempt to indicate a major event that was necessarily slighted in the film. Rather, it helps to emphasize the aspects of the fantastic and the fairy tale romanticism that the director is emphasizing.

The live actors are shot against an animated background and are often blithely unaware of the fantastic things that are sweeping around them while they concern themselves with the essentially silly issues of their lives. This is Czech animation which seems rather exotic to those of us raised on Disney-esque 'realism'. Still, it's stylism adds a charm to the film that helps to reinforce the multiple layers that the director has built into this piece.

You should not attempt to become involved in the film so much as to sit back and marvel at the world that is passing unobserved by those passing through it.

When it has finished,you will want to watch it again and again to catch how all the different visual layers interact in your mind if not on the screen.

If I had to compare this effect to any other film, I suppose I would choose the way that Altman weaves the foreground and background into the midground in "M*A*S*H", though the two films are very different and have completely different statements about the world.

This is a fantasy and it is truly fantastic, but only on an adult level. Children will have many questions that all come down to 'why is it happening that way?' For children, fantasy is a chance to dream dreams and play games. This is a film for adults that has found an adult way to present the wit and contradiction of the original stories while acting out the ingenuousness of the characters' actions.

See this one. It deserves your attention.

Zeman's magnum opus is every bit as compelling and otherworldly as the legends indicate. In fact, as I also have FABULOUS WORLD OF JULES VERNE & ON THE COMET on tape, take my word for it: PRASIL/MUNCHAUSEN is the Zeman to see if your only seeing one. Given those hallucinatory Gustav Dore-meets- Arthur Rackham visuals, the wildly disjointed narrative and from-hunger post-synched soundtrack actually ADD to the out-of-body experience that is this film. It's like stumbling into somebody else's fever dream. While Zeman's other films generally succumb to a deadly torpor around halfway through, this one is just so jampacked with surreal oddities and unforgettable bizarro setpieces that you're in flabbergasted joy right through to the end. Terry Gilliam (a major Zeman fan) attempted a lavish remake that missed the whole point of this film's one-of-a-kind quality: the sense throughout that this is a handcrafted film, an artisan's project free of studio meddling, brand name stars or big budget elephantiasis. PRASIL's amateurism is its crowning glory. Essential viewing...at least once.