Tichý týden v dome

We've all heard of voyeurism (think "Psycho"), but never like what the Czech short "Tichy tyden v dome" portrays. A man - most likely on the lam - takes refuge in a house, where he drills holes in the wall, and sees the weirdest things imaginable. This is the sort of thing that could only come from Jan Svankmajer. Working as he did in the Eastern Bloc, Svankmajer probably didn't have a lot of fancy technology, but he clearly had imagination, as these movies show. Believe you me, what happens here is all about imagination.

So "Czech" it out. Like it or not, this is still a movie that you ought to see.

This is a bafflingly weird surrealist film from the master of stop-motion, Jan Svankmajer. It begins with a man in home-made camouflage hiding out and then sprinting to an apparently abandoned house. He pulls out a hand drill and bores a hole in a door each day and peers through it--revealing a variety of stop-motion shows unique to that hole. Then, he goes to be--only to repeat the process the next day. All in all, the film takes place over seven days and shows what's behind six different holes. On the 7th day, he shaves and places dynamite around the place! Since the film is clearly surrealist, it is not intended to have any serious meaning but to provoke and baffle the viewer. However, I did like the stop-motion and the film was occasionally a bit funny. I particularly liked the disembodied tongue that was animated on day 2. Weird, wacky but worth a look.

Jan Svankmajer's "A Quiet Week in the House" is one of the strangest surrealist films ever made, not so much in a dreamlike, nonsensical way (that goes to "Un Chien Andalou") but in a more subtle, light manner. The simple plot manages to be quite weird for what it is, and the visuals work extremely well for their purpose. Watching this work, one can clearly see how the Brothers Quay got their inspiration from Svankmajer, as the enigmatic stop-motion that makes it appearance here is very reminiscent of them. The main nit-pick the film offers up is that the animation itself, while incredible, is the backbone of the plot; what story there is is set up mainly to accompany the visuals.

The film begins with a man spying through binoculars at the surrounding countryside. Shortly after, he enters an abandoned house to stay a week; every day of his life in the quiet place, he drills a hole through each door and looks through to watch numerous weird surrealistic visions only Svankmajer could come up with. The execution of the images is particularly stunning in how they stutter consistently to create an interesting effect (one also new to the filmmaker as well as to me). There is a very weird ending to top it off, which brings a nice close to the twenty-minute short. As a whole, it is one to see mainly for the stop-motion, but the story itself is a good one even if it does little more than set up the effects.

Luckily for me the first time i saw this was in Brighton's duke of york cinema during a Svankmajer festival. Svankmajer's use of sound is always incredible. Like the other reviewers i would struggle to interpret this one, what it makes me feel and think i cannot put into words.