I thought I’d written about this one before; I had but only a brief mention in a post about Czech film-maker Karel Zeman which links to a deleted YouTube copy of the film. More of a glass world than a crystal world, Inspiration (1948) is Zeman’s most celebrated short, one which predates his marvellous semi-animated features based on books by Jules Verne and others.
A creator of glass ornaments abandons his unsatisfying sketching to gaze at the rain running down a window pane. Outside the window the water gathered on a leaf contains an ice-like world of frozen surfaces, penguins, swans and skating figures. It’s an entrancing piece that makes glass figurines seem as pliable as creatures fashioned from clay or Plasticine. The film is also notable for a musical accompaniment by Zdeněk Liška, one of the composer’s earliest scores that sounds rather anonymous next to the idiosyncrasies of his later works.
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• Zemania