L'ossuaire

While I am a big lover of the films of Jan Svankmajer, I am not blinded to the fact that occasionally he was NOT as his best...and that clearly can be said about "The Ossuary". While the setting is amazing and make the film worth seeing, the filmmaker's techniques in this particular film are distracting and just plain bad. I know Svankmajer fans would blanch at me saying this, but the film seemed cheap and poorly made.

There is a crypt in old Czechoslovakia that contains the bones of 70,000 people. But the monks decided to arrange the skulls and skeletons in amazingly ornate and creepy ways...such as a chandelier made up of these parts. I've seen pictures and documentaries about it before...but none like this film. Instead of showing it in the usual way, the film looks as if was made with an 8mm camera and the edits are intentionally annoying and awful. All this is narrated by a rather boring guide who is about as compelling to listen to as a dog with adenoids...accompanied with the rattling of bones. All in all, this is a case where the film couldn't help but be interesting but somehow Svankmajer, in an odd fluke, makes the absolute least of it. A very disappointing short film.

Svankmejer made a diversion from his vivid world to make this short , mostly non-narrative film. We are taken on a journey to one of the most horrificly spellbinding building in the world , which has been made from the skull's,rib's,legs,breastbones etc etc of thousands of bodies, to form the arches and doorways and to generally adorne this building.. With frantic jump cuts , a soundtrack that seems to ring in the ears for hours afterward and his own style give us a truly original way of seeing this macabre building. Watch this and then go for a walk in the woods , alone.

Watching this, I was stunned such a place exists. To be perfectly honest, I didn't know the meaning of the word "ossuary," but I do now. This is the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic and, I guarantee you, a place unlike any you have ever seen.

For history of this amazing shrine, if you will, please read Galina's review here. She seems well-versed on the topic.

To see a building, an old chapel, with 70,000 skulls and human bones in it, arranged "artistically," is really eerie, wouldn't you say? It looks even stranger with Czech filmmaker Jan Swankmejer's grainy black-and-white photography, and how he presents what is there.

In the background we hear a woman giving a tour to students. We never see her or the kids, but we hear her throughout. She sounds as odd as this place and almost gets hysterical in the end when she thinks some kid might have handled one of the bones. She says she's worked there for a year-and-a-half and she feels a kinship with these bones, looking at them (my words, not hers) as if they are still alive and she is protecting them. That's how she comes across.

Anyway, the "story" is not her but this incredible place with skulls and complete skeletons all over - floors, walls, ceilings....everywhere you see in this big chapel. Most of these people died horrific deaths, many because of the Black Death: the plague. It's unbelievable. One piece of "art" is a chandelier from human bones and skulls that someone from America offered $100,000 for back in 1968.

I imagine it's really incredible to see this in person. It's macabre, to say the least, and perhaps it is the most bizarre placed to visit on Earth.

There are two versions of this short movie - one with a music sound-track and the second one (that was banned during the communistic era) with a sound record of a voice of an "educated" guide (some old women). It is funny and bitter at the same time. There are no visual differences between these two versions, just the sound-track is different. I wondered (and I still wonder:-) which of these two versions is older. The cutting is the same but it is suited to the song. But the second version (with voice soundtrack) was banned, so I suppose that the song was composed because of this reason... One of the (many) nice typical Svankmajer's moments, that I like in this movie, is the squeaking sound of bicycle in the beginning.

In "The Ossuary", Jan Svankmajer shows that while he was still in his preliminary stages of filmmaking, the styles he utilized in his earliest works would ultimately become extremely important to his work later on. This 1970 work does not make use of any animation as later became the director's trademark, and is more of a documentary than an avant-garde short, but the absolute most is made of the setting he had to work with, and it is executed to perfection as a result. Most of this is due largely to the camerawork, which is sometimes non-stationary and other times moves controlled by stop-motion - essentially the only use of the technique seen in the entire movie.

The ten-minute film documents a historic chapel, famous for the fact that the various decorations and ornaments inside the place are made entirely of human bones. The setting alone is interesting enough to make the film work, but the creative editing and camerawork brings the setting to life in a crazy way. Little actually happens, and the soundtrack itself consists entirely of a Spanish-speaking narrator talking about the history (apparently), but Svankmajer made the most of what he had to work with and the result is a truly amazing meditation on death.