The Special Effects of Karel Zeman : PART 1

Documentary on Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman’s incredible special effects. Karel Zeman (November 3, 1910, Ostroměř near Nová Paka, then Austria-Hungary – April 5, 1989, Prague, then Czechoslovakia) was a Czech animator and filmmaker. He is considered the co-founder of the Czech animated film. He started to be interested in puppet theatre while studying at business school. Soon after, he decided to study at the Art School of Advertising in France, and after graduating he took a job with an advertising studio in Marseilles. His first experience with animated film was making an ad for soup. When he returned home he continued working in advertising, now for big Czech firms Bata and Tatra. Zeman showed a sample of his work to the filmmaker Elmar Klos, and was offered a job at the animation studio in Zlín. He accepted the job in 1943. Once there, he met animator Hermína Týrlová, who had just finished animating the all-time children’s favorite Ferda Mravenec (Ferda the Ant, based on a story by Ondřej Sekora). Together, Zeman and Týrlova made the animated film Vánoční sen (Christmas Dream) and won the award for Best Animation at the 1946 festival in Cannes. Zeman was well on his way to becoming a world-renowned animator.

Part one of Labyrinth by Jan Lenica Made in 1963, Lenica created “Labyrinth” a self-consciously Kafka-esque tale of a winged lonely man literally devoured by totalitarian rule. Along with Jiří Trnka’s Ruka (The Hand, 1965), Labirynt is considered to be one of the finest political animations ever made. Jan Lenica’s checkered career has encompassed excursions into music, architecture, poster-making, costume design, children’s book illustration, and all aspects of filmmaking. It is, however, for his animation that he is best known, particularly his collage and “cutout” films, which have their roots in the art of Max Ernst and John Heartfield. The films have influenced the work of Jan Švankmajer and Terry Gilliam. In the 1950s, his films with Walerian Borowczyk led an aesthetic revolution in Poland that sent reverberations all over the Eastern European animation scene. Before Lenica entered the scene, Polish animation consisted mainly of American-influenced character animation, over which the shadow of Walt Disney lugubriously hung, sometimes with vaguely political overtones on the fringe. Lenica and Borowczyk moved the avant-garde into the mainstream. They attempted to forge a new experimental cinema that would coalesce contemporary artistic practices such as abstraction, collage, and satirical surrealism without jettisoning commitment to the Marxist concepts of artistic integration of form and content and art for the masses. Often their films deal with alienation in a …
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