Byt ("The Apartment") by Jan Svankmajer (1968)

A short film from Soviet Czechoslovakia, directed by the amazing Jan Svankmajer. There's no dialog, just action set to music. Like all works of surrealism, it's open to many interpretations. (12 min, B&W.)

My own interpretation is that Svankmajer is describing how it feels to be an eccentric, creative genius in a maddeningly Kafkaesque world. (This could be the Soviet Union in particular, which censored much of his work for being "degenerate", but it could easily apply to our own society, which has its own ways of making life difficult for unconventional artists and visionaries.) Nothing in the apartment seems to work the way it's expected to. When the man tries to break an egg, it punches a hole through the table. The bed turns to sawdust as he's sleeping in it. A butcher enters with a chicken, but leaves the ax instead of the bird.

For me, the most powerful part is the ending, when the man thinks he's found a way out of the apartment but the door only leads to a solid wall inscribed with the names of all the others who have been there before. Notice the series of conflicted emotions that play across the man's face when he realizes that, for his life of frustrated confusion, he's earned the right to leave his mark for posterity.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• svankmajer
• byt
• the apartment
• stop motion
• surreal
• czech
• animation

[maryrevery]

I have all his short films on DVD. <3