Dans la cave

This brilliant 15-minute short, combining live action of: a little girl going down to the cellar to get some potatoes; an old man; an old woman; and a cat, and stop-motion animation of the potatoes and some hungry shoes, is eerily fascinating. (Stop here if you want to see the piece with no preconceptions).Images include the woman making coal blocks out of coal dust & eggs, hungry shoes eating a croissant, a man lying in a bed of coal and pulling lumps of coal over him as a blanket, and the poor little girl trying to get a basket full of potatoes back up the stairs. Whenever her back is turned, the potatoes find a way to roll back into their bin. She props the lid of the bin up with a piece of wood. It's evident from the thumping that the lid would bang shut if it could (which it did previously, to the consternation of the girl). The last time the black cat appears it seems to be extremely large. As the girl runs up the stairs, the potatoes fall out of the basket, heading back to the bin. The cat is just sitting grooming itself. The girl heads back down to her apparently sisyphean task - the cat looks at her and runs after her with a miaow.

"Do Pivnice" is a short film by the master stop-motion director, Jan Svankmajer. Not surprisingly, the film is very creepy--as creepy animation is a trademark of Svankmajer's style. And, it uses bizarre everyday objects instead of the usual stop-motion models.

The film begins with a little girl going down some stairs on the way to the cellar to get some potatoes. The people the child meets are pretty normal folks and a cat, but Stankmajer uses exaggerated sound to make them seem more scary and otherworldly. When she arrives at her destination, the lighting is very dark and creepy. So far, no stop-motion has been employed--just sounds and light in a rather creepy locale inside the cellar. Where it goes next, I won't say--but it's VERY funny and very weird and might create a phobia in some watching the film and you may never look at bread or shoes the same way again! And you assume perhaps the child is imagining all these weird things....or is she?!

Only a weird person like Stankmajer would make such an outlandish and creepy film. Now this is NOT a criticism--we need weird people making films on occasion, otherwise life would be very dull. The film is successful because it sets a very strange and frightening mood. And, in an odd way, it's also rather funny. However, since it is so unusual, I can only assume it's a film that would be appreciated by some and would leave others baffled. I liked it.

In one of Jan Svankmajer's many surreal shorts, a little girl goes downstairs to get some potatoes, and sees some pretty unusual things: a man sleeping in coal, a woman baking things made of coal, and shoes eating croissants. And the cat is also something perplexing. Maybe "Do pivnice" is looking at confronting our fears, or maybe something else. But whatever the overarching idea is, this is a pretty neat flick. I think that more than anything, these sorts of movies should disprove the notion that many of us in the West probably have that nothing creative came from the Eastern Bloc; it seems to me that Svankmajer's work is more creative than a lot of what I've seen from the US. So definitely "Czech" this movie out.

One of my favorites from Svankmajer is this short about a little girl going down into a cellar... for what reason is only made once or twice maybe slightly clear (?), but Svankmajer isn't out for clarity. He's out to achieve, and he does so, a pure sense of surreality and terror, but not in that simple sense of "oh, there's a black cat, you scared me." In Svankmajer's universe the little girl will look at the cat for a little while, and right back at her from the cat, and she will maybe loom in on something very strange going on with slabs of black coal being turned into cookies (?) and all the while this universe is dark as hell and lit like it's out of your scariest imaginations. You won't be jumping out of your seat scared, as it's not exactly the kind of horror film where a woman goes down into a cellar with a whole other reaction in the Orphanage. This one is more concerned with the sense of mind of a little girl going down a flight of stairs and passing dangerous men (oddly running throughout the director's work like in Little Otik), and of going through a cavernous corridor with sewer piping working along and, lastly but not least, that darn cat! Watch it if you dare! Or, you know, got 15 minutes to spare for some crazy but imaginative cinema. 9.5/10

What a strange film. A little girl is asked to go in the cellar and bring up a basket of potatoes. During the time down there, she is subjected to some terrifying visions. Coal seems to be at the root of just about everything (as well as a coal black cat). The most unsettling thing is that whenever she gathers her potatoes they take on a life of their own and "escape."