Lunacy

I was introduced to Jan Svankmajer's work with a feature film called "Conspirators of Pleasure" which was a movie with no dialogue and dealt with masturbation. That said, I fell in love with the czech surrealists work and animation."Lunacy" is another gem (this time with dialogue!) and is based loosely on the works of Poe and the Marquis de Sade (but you can tell that from reading the dvd jacket, you silly monkey!)and I know that there is dialogue in his other films such as "Faust" and "Alice", but this film seems to rely more on the words then the visuals.From all of his films I've seen, this could very well be my favorite.I know this is just my opinion and everything, but you owe it to yourself to purchase this film. Watch it, Love it, and let your friends borrow it and enjoy it's awesomeness!

An exceptionally well made, warm hearted comedy drama for the whole family. Not many family films touch on this level of compassion.

Jan Svanksmajer strikes again with this relentless and provocative film. A wonderful tapestry in which demons emerge. And what other place in the world is the most appropriate but a madhouse to show the decline in all its dreadful human cruelty and thirst for hidden perversions inimiginable?With inspiration coming from Poe and the Marquis de Sade, the film revolves around Jean Berlot, who is unwittingly recruited by a stranger who leads him to the antechamber of hell. An asylum where black masses, perversions, and punishments therapeutic fuerales numbered according to the degree of cruelty are put into practice. Jean meets Charlotte, an attractive woman who falls for revealing some of the secrets behind the door.An amazing trip to the antipodes of the unfathomable horror universe without restrictions. Svnakmajer pays well-deserved tribute to the legendary movie Marat Sade by Peter Brooks, 1967.Do not miss it.

VERY GOOD!

great

Faust was much better. Lunacy seemed ridiculous.

lunacy

In his introduction to the film inside the own film Jan Svankmajer compares modern societies with a lunatics assylum. The subject of " Lunacy " is essentially an ideological debate about how to rule an institution. " Basically there are two ways of managing an institution, and each equally extreme ": one looks at the absolute freedom; the other, the old-fashioned based on absolute rules and punishment. And there is also - he concludes - another one that combines the worst things of both " and this is the mad-house in we're living today ". As the protagonist of the film, as artists nowadays, modern democracies seem to move between two chairs, to walk behind the fog.Placed in the ninenteenth century rural France, " Lunacy " is freely inspired by a not very popular tale by E. A. Poe titled " The system of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether ", about a mental hospital ruled by their patients ( this is by lunatics ), and also by the decadentist and anticlerical criticism of the Marquis the Sade. We find too some references to the spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel ( for instance, in the scene in which the aeseptic and sadistic lead doctor of the asylum shows to her lover the content of a bizarre box and that the spectator never get to known ) so as another tribute to Poe in the scene of the therapeutic burial. The result is a satirical and thought-provoking surreal horror tale where Svankmajer conjugates grotesque, cool stop-motion animation, kinky sex, gothic horror imaginary, disturbing analogies, circular nigthmares, lunatics and meat puppets to built up a pessimistic political parable about mankind alienation and indecisiveness in industrializied societies.I've heard some commentaries by Svankamajer fans dissapointed about " Lunacy " because it has not many animation sequences, as frequently many of their followers wait to find in his movies. It's true: the animated scenes, inserted in the film as macabre vignettes of surrealist imagination or sarcastic and philosophical graphic commentaries, hardly reach to be twenty minutes in all the whole film, but this doesn't avoid to place Svankmajer's last feature-length film as one of his finest and most subversive works.Another disturbing and exquisite work by this genial and dark alchemist of the surreal.