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Karel Zeman film posters

A festival poster from 2022. Zeman’s films are popular in Japan.

Last week’s post about Czech film-maker Karel Zeman prompted me to see whether any more of his feature films have become available on disc. The international success of Zeman’s semi-animated adventures led to the production of more films along similar lines, although not all of these are as fantastic (or as popular) as Invention for Destruction or Baron Munchausen. A Jester’s Tale, for example, is a historical drama, albeit one which still makes use of Zeman’s skill with animation and special effects. The Karel Zeman Museum in Prague has been slowly restoring and reissuing the director’s features on DVD and blu-ray discs, the most recent title being The Stolen Airship, another film based on Jules Verne’s novels which I’m looking forward to seeing. The museum has also been increasing its production of spin-off products, including poster prints which include a couple of designs I hadn’t seen before. Browsing the poster sites revealed a few more attractive designs for international releases.

The Treasure of Bird Island (1953)

Czech, 1953. Art by Jindřich Cech.

I still haven’t seen Zeman’s first two features. The Treasure of Bird Island is wholly animated story based on a Persian fairy tale.

Journey to Prehistory (1955)

Poland, 1955. Art by Jan Młodożeniec.

Zeman’s second feature is his first film to mix live action and animation, with a story about a group of boys whose journey down a river leads to an encounter with prehistoric creatures. I like the way this poster reduces the narrative to its basic elements while also looking like a design for a Godzilla-themed postage stamp.

Invention for Destruction (1958)

Czech, 1958. Art by Karel Knechtl.

A film I’ve enthused about before, and an ideal place to start with Zeman’s fantasies.

Poland, 1958. Art by Jan Lenica.

“That looks like a Jan Lenica design,” I thought, and so it is. The human-headed fish vehicle has little to do with Zeman’s film but a character like this wouldn’t be out of place in one of Lenica’s own animations, especially Labirynt.

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Inspiration, a film by Karel Zeman

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.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zemania

A Country Doctor, a film by Koji Yamamura

Writing about Koji Yamamura’s Parade de Satie a couple of months ago, I mentioned his adaptation of a Franz Kafka story, A Country Doctor (2007), and here it is. The Kafka adaptation was made a few years before Parade de Satie, and differs so much from the later film that you’d think they were the work of different directors. Where Parade is colourful, frivolous, and as lively as the ballet it was based upon, A Country Doctor is dark, disturbing and unpredictable. Yamamura says he chose the Kafka story from a collection of stories presented to him by a production company, only one of which appealed to him. This, coincidentally, is how Orson Welles came to direct The Trial, after producer Alexander Salkind suggested he choose a book to adapt from a list that Salkind gave him.

The events of Yamamura’s film—a country doctor is called out on a snowy night to attend to a young patient—are typical of Kafka in his shorter mode, in which absurb or dream-like situations have a tendency to slide into nightmare. Yamamura depicts the doctor’s visit in a sketchy hand-drawn style where the figures and their surroundings are continually subject to wild distortions and abrupt alterations of perspective. It’s the type of physical exaggeration that you see in the UPA cartoons of the 1950s but in those films the effect is almost always deployed for comic effect. When used in a more realistic context the distortions add to the dream-like quality of Yamamura’s film. The story is augmented by a fine score composed by Hitomi Shimizu which includes an Ondes Martenot among the instruments. If I’d have seen this in 2011 I would have included it on my list of notable Kafka film and TV adaptations.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s machine
• The Metamorphosis of Mr Samsa, a film by Caroline Leaf
• Kafkaesque
• Screening Kafka
• Designs on Kafka
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• A postcard from Doctor Kafka
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka

Tuning Instruments, a film by Jerzy Kucia

Back in February I posted a link to Jerzy Kucia’s first animated short, The Return. Since then I’ve been watching more Kucia films on Essential Polish Animation, a newly-released two-disc set that presents restored versions of 27 short films in high-definition. Tuning Instruments (2000) is a later addition to the Kucia oeuvre that isn’t on the Radiance collection. It’s also quite different to all the other films I’ve seen by this director, Kucia being one of those animators who tended to vary his stylistic and technical approaches from one film to the next.

The film does at least share a mood with some of Kucia’s later animations, a dream-like quality where the play of successive images is more important than any kind of structured narrative. Animation is an ideal medium for representing the shifting terrain of dreams yet the opportunity to do so remains under-explored. Quotes from Kucia in a biographical article at Culture.pl suggest that, for this director at least, the subjectivity of memory is more of a concern than the elusiveness of dreams. Tuning Instruments begins with a man doing exercises in a room. This sequence is followed by a motorcycle journey presented as a scrolling view of traffic and windows, after which the initial protagonist is forgotten in favour of a continually changing parallax landscape that leads us to a crow-filled wood in a misty countryside. I’ve no idea how Kucia and his assistants achieved many of their effects. The Culture.pl article says he mostly used drawings on paper yet the images are often overlaid or multiplied in a way that disguises their origin. Best to immerse yourself in the flow of imagery than wonder how it was achieved or what it all means

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Return, a film by Jercy Kucia

Weekend links 787

Noonday Heat (1903) by Henry Scott Tuke.

• It may still be summer but the Halloween film reissues are already being announced. This year Radiance Films is presenting two features by Belgian director Harry Kümel: the lesbian vampire drama Daughters of Darkness (UHD+BD | BD), and Malpertuis, Kümel’s adaptation of the Jean Ray fantasy novel. This week I’ve been watching Polish animated films on Radiance’s just-released Essential Polish Animation.

• At Colossal: Dennis Lehtonen documents a pair of immense icebergs paying a visit to a small Greenland village.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: ShoreZone, nine short stories by dramatist David Rudkin.

The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?

Perhaps by re-engaging its speculative origins. Through the mode of thought characteristic of science fiction, the science of alien language might yet learn to open itself to every conceivable degree of otherness, even the possibility of beings that share nothing with us but the cosmos.

Eli K P William on problems in xenolinguistics

• DJ Food’s latest foray into pop psychedelia is a look at the psych influence on the teen romance comics of the late 1960s: part 1 | part 2 | part 3.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – July 2025 at Ambientblog, and Bleep Mix #305 by Adam Wiltzie.

• “The hot tar splashed everywhere.” Dale Berning Sawa on Derek Jarman’s Black Paintings.

• At Unquiet Things: Meet your friendly neighbourhood art book author & book seller.

• Winners of the 2025 Big Picture natural world photography competition.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great heatwave films.

• The closest images ever taken of the Sun’s atmosphere.

• Kae Tempest’s favourite records.

• Heat (1983) by Soft Cell | Heatwave (1984) by The Blue Nile | Heatwave (1987) by Univers Zero