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The triumphant "isms"

A new Czech animated film taps the nation's absurdity
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 7th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
A Žižkov of the mind. Some of the many inmates that inhabit Jan Balej's One Night in One City.
In the face of Czechs’ innate sense of surrealism and aburdism, did the dreadful “isms” of the fascists and communists ever really stand a chance? It is, undoubtedly, this very national passion for looking at the world askew that helped people survive the last century’s murderous seriousness — especially in Prague, where, as Angelo Maria Ripellino said, the city has always worn an “eternal smirk.”
The greatest achievements in Czech cinema are those films that connect to this spirit of absurdity or the super-reality of fever dreams. So it’s not surprising that some of the finest Czech work occurs in animation and puppetry.
Jan Balej’s latest film, Jedné noci v jednom městě (One Night in One City) contains all the inventiveness and bleak whimsy of Švankmajer, as well as the Czech master’s foreign progeny, the Brothers Quay. There are comically tragic lives lived out in the lurid digs of a vast junkscape, all of which is composed into a panopticon of injured toys, desiccated bees, kitchen scraps, discarded fabric swatches and rusted nuts and bolts. There’s a tang of rot in the air of this world: “Life is a disease of matter,” as Samuel Beckett’s uncle once informed him. Life is absurd, so one can only shrug and laugh.
In an interview with The Prague Post two weeks ago, Balej said that his film, fully geared for adults, was inspired by the wildness and weirdness that one can still find lurking in corners of Žižkov. But it is most certainly a Žižkov of the mind.
One Night is divided into three stories. The first centers on life in a rundown tenament, where the inmates manage to get through their endless days with secret hobbies. In one flat, a man has hurried home to add the newest dead insect performers to his miniature circus. Meanwhile, his downstairs neighbor is hunting for bears in the backyard. As there are few bears in Žižkov, the man has been forced to create a bear suit for the family dog to wear.
Of all the lives in the house, this poor dog’s lot could be the worst. He’s rescued from his bruin get-up by the lady of the house, who then takes him out for a walk to another neighbor, who happens to run a pet crematorium studio inside his flat (the hilarious use of “studio” on his business card reminds one of the baby rendering “studio” in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Oil of Dog”).
Inside the flat, the lady and the neighbor quickly become lovers, though his eyes are really on her little mutt, whom he’s desperate to pop in the oven.
One Night in One City

Directed by Jan Balej
A stop-action animated film with the voices of Jiří Lábus and others

The rest of the house harbors a man who pays prostitutes to watch him dance in a loincloth and peacock hat, a cokehead who inadvertently hoovers ants up his nose, and a woman who nightly slops her husband and children with soup, then attends to her real loved one: a donkey in the next room.
The second part is a seasonal tour of town with an animate tree and his fish friend (who nervously sweats the sea now that he’s out of water). The third and title piece is a phantasmagoria of a bizarre Žižkovian street scene.
This painstaking film, which took Balej six years to realize, is a gem of stop-action, a type of animation that Balej fears is on borrowed time due to the rage for computer animation, though thankfully it‘s still kicking in the Czech lands. Balej and his assistants have also created some brilliant designs for One Night, both in the construction of their alternative Žižkov and in the characters that are immured within it.
As Balej has used a made-up babble that only occasionally includes an odd real word, One Night is fully accessible to English speakers. It is, in fact, a great chance to see our host country fully exercising its continuing infatuation for the surreal.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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