Les jeux des anges

Game of the Angels, The (1963)

** (out of 4)

Animated short takes place inside a strange factory where angels are being created. Here's another Borowczyk short that is short on plot and I suppose the story should be in the viewer's eyes. I'm sure the director had some point going in this film but it certainly never struck me as to what. Even though I didn't get the story itself the visuals in the film left me rather cold. The reddish tinting was a nice touch but I found the creativity in the visuals rather lacking. I'm guessing one could say they were meant to be that way but it just didn't work for me. The short runs just under twelve-minutes with the first six showing us the factory without anything going on. The second half of the film is when everything comes to life and the angel is created.

You're in a train. You're dragged through a barren landscape. Occasionally shells fly past. You have no idea what's going on. The train stops and you find yourself in a plain concrete cell. A few pipes stick out from the wall. And then the horror begins.

Borowczyk's early animation is a disturbing and haunting piece, a metaphor for dehumanising death machines in general and the Holocaust in particular. Short, but hard to forget, and with a pervasively disturbing soundtrack that sinks in to your mind.

So many short films deal in a nightmare state. I have alway contended that David Lynch presented his nightmares to us, but there is a sort of coherence to them. This film is either beyond me or so obtuse that it begs to be interpreted. I can't say I ever embraced any of it. Some of the art is quite fascinating. But, as a whole, I didn't get it.

After finding Renaissance (1963-also reviewed) to be a wonderfully off-beat short, I got set to play the next game in Arrow's set of Walerian Borowczyk's shorts.

View on the film:

Peeled away from the bright surreal colours and industrial hum of the earlier shorts, writer/director Walerian Borowczyk continues to experiment with his animation styling,in this case showing a great improvement in using camera moves to bring a added dimension to the dour colours of this abstract concentration camp allegory, panning into the cells of angels.