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Chicago audiences have a special treat this coming week. Beginning Friday, Facets Multimedia, 1517 W. Fullerton, is presenting a retrospective of the great Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. Entitled "Alchemist of the Surreal," the program presents Svankmajer's four feature-length films and two different sets of short films over the course of seven days. As the program's title suggests, Svankmajer is a surrealist, one who uses puppetry, stop-motion animation, and bizarre, even nightmarish, scenarios to explore the nature of oppression, decay and . . . food.

The best opportunity to experience Svankmajer's twisted imagination is the series of shorts showing Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday. Covering a period from 1964-1992, the programs show both the artistic and political
development of Svankmajer's vision. What's especially interesting is how various motifs reappear throughout his work.

In the early short "J.S. Bach: Fantasy in G Minor," Svankmajer uses a panning camera and stop-motion animation to explore the nature of decay. The plaster on the walls of an old building crumble before our eyes, various windows are boarded up or even covered over in bricks, and the bars on the remaining windows are reminiscent of a jail cell. But as the organ fugue subtly reminds us, we're actually inside an abandoned church. The crumbling nature and oppression of organized religion are monstrously symbolized in a later short entitled "The Pit, Pendulum and Hope." Based on the Edgar Allen Poe story, the audience becomes the man strapped on a table watching the slicing pendulum lower ever closer to our torso. The subjective point-of-view is extremely effective, as is the black-and-white photography and rapid editing. The irony of the title is that there is no hope. Though we may escape the pendulum, robed monks stand guard outside so that no one may escape. Even if you subscribe to a different religious viewpoint, Svankmajer's artistic vision is genuinely provocative.

This inability to escape comes up in other live-action shorts, such as "Down to the Cellar" and "The Flat." In the latter, a man finds himself in a small room designed to thwart his every need. The mirror shows the back of his head instead of his face, the soup spoon acts as a sieve, and the bed literally crumbles away as he sleeps.

This last image, a spectacular use of stop-motion animation, is representative of much of Svankmajer's work. In "The Last Trick of Mr.Schwarzwald and Mr. Edgar," Svankmajer uses animation to simulate dancing chairs. "Jabberwocky" features a dancing knife. In "Historia Naturae" animal skeletons move about while live animals mysteriously turn into stuffed specimens. In "Possibilities of a Dialogue," enormous heads made  out of found objects devour each other and then regurgitate another head. The found objects slowly decay until we're left with two beautiful heads of clay. But soon those heads are fighting, and we're left with merely mud. My favorite of the shorts (a difficult choice), "Manly Games," portrays a game of stop-motion soccer in which coffins are more important than goals.

Though Svankmajer's work is concerned with serious, even depressing, topics, it is also very, very funny. The juxtaposition of various images often causes bursts of laughter. One shot, of a puppet grooming a live hamster, will stay with me for some time. The final short, "Food," features three scenarios of eating. I won't spoil the surprises for you, but they're genuinely comic, if also a little disturbing.

The Svankmajer series opens Friday night with the U.S. premiere of Little Otik. Based on an old folk tale, it tells the story of a man who carves a tree-trunk into a child for his wife. The wife's obsession with her new
"baby" causes the object to come to life, with catastrophic results.

The other feature films include 1996's Conspirators of Pleasure on Monday and next Thursday and Svankmajer's first feature, Alice, which is his own take on Lewis Carroll's famous story (Saturday and next Wednesday). My favorite of the bunch, however, is Faust (Sunday and next Thursday). Svankmajer's combination of live action puppets, enormous masks, and inventive stop-motion animation truly redefines Goethe's famous tale. Fantastically strange, hilarious, and deeply thought-provoking, Faust is a must-see film. Don't miss this great opportunity to see one of cinema's true originals.

If the politics of Jan Svankmajer are subtle and hilarious, those of Jafar Panahi's new film The Circle are all too obvious. The Iranian director who showed so much promise with "The White Balloon" returns with a movie that
trades in the beautiful simplicity of that tale for didactic bluntness.

The Circle begins at a hospital where a woman is having a baby. Though she's been led to believe it's a boy from the sonograms, it turns out to be a girl, much to the displeasure of her husband and his family. We move from that scene to two women who are frantically but surreptitiously looking for money to get on a bus. It turns out that the women have escaped from prison and are trying to get home. That narrative leads us to another woman who has escaped from prison, but she's been kicked out of her own house, because she wants to have an abortion. Over the course of the movie's ninety minutes, we'll also meet a woman hiding her past from her new husband, a woman who can't take care of her daughter, and a prostitute singled out by the police.

I'm sure you can tell that the movie is concerned with the role of women in Iran. That's a worthy, even audacious, subject. And for a while, it makes for compelling drama. Panahi films with the documentary-style approach that's become the hallmark of the Iranian New Wave. Using hand-held cameras and a number of point-of-view shots, he makes the difficulties and fears of his female characters seem palpable.

Also effective is his narrative approach which follows one storyline for a few scenes until it hooks up with another character whose life we then discover. By jumping into a situation and then leaving before it's
resolved, Panahi's film creates wonderful layers of ambiguity that nicely offset his societal observations.

Unfortunately, the movie's ending completely undermines that approach, as the movie comes full-circle and reveals what lies in wait for our various heroines. The obvious conclusion feels like something we'd get in a
Hollywood film, though, given Panahi's agenda, it's necessarily bleaker. The Circle isn't a bad film, but, given its director and narrative possibilities, it is a disappointing one.   

J. Robert Parks 6/7/2001