Virtual Pheromone

A Prague filmmaker since the 1960’s, Jan Švankmajer’s innovative and experimental work has survived six different political regimes, Communist censors and even an official ban. A satirical and subversive updated fairy tale, Little Otik intermingles live action, stop motion and traditional animation. Food, a favorite Švankmajer theme, is taken to a deliciously perverse and nuanced place in Little Otik as a metaphor for capitalist consumption, sex and communication. Karel and Božena’s intense desire to have a child becomes a surreal nightmare when Karel attempts to comfort his wife with a tree root vaguely resembling a baby. To Karel’s horror, the mandrake-like-root pushes Božena’s maternal desire to obsession. Brought to animated life, the tree-baby Otik develops his own unquenchable appetite…for human flesh. The film’s heroine, the young neighbor girl Alžbětka, begins to notice parallels between Božena’s bizarre pregnancy and a Czech fairy tale. Feeling sorry for baby Otik, whose ‘parents’ abandon him after several people in the apartment block disappear, Alžbětka tries to curb Otik’s hunger before he meets the fate of his fairy-tale counterpart.

Little Otik (Otesánek)
Directed by Jan Švankmajer
Starring Jan Hartl & Veronika Zilková
Czech Republic, 2000

–review by Colleen Jankovic

From its stunning title sequence to its final melancholic twinkle, Lola never relents in simultaneously tantalizing and agitating your senses. Fassbinder magnetizes all the polarities of his style, infusing Lola with his every last artistic tendency. Filming each scene with a different emotional lens, he obscures any consistent tone for the sake of full dramaturgical expression. Lola saturates the screen with a lush, silken color palette and sun-kissed lighting schemes to fashion a delightfully playful aesthetic. Maintaining a small narrative focus, Fassbinder achieves magnificent scope of emotions as Lola navigates the politics of sex, love, family values, post-war identity, urban redevelopment, class struggle, and capitalism. The film plays like a rollicking performance piece, even though it’s run through with the director’s infamously anti-theatrical choreography and neo-Brechtian curiosity. Lola’s passionate cabaret routines drape the melodrama in elegiac undertones, revealing desperation beneath rosy cheeks. Warm, jazzy transitions convey an emotional flourish, punctuating scenes with a rush of blood to the head. Although he’s kept a keen eye trained on distance (both spatial and social), Fassbinder never so thoroughly examined the distance between our hearts and heads as he does with this film.

Lola
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring Barbara Sukowa & Armin Mueller-Stahl
West Germany, 1981

–review by andrew mckeon