Lunacy

Salvador Fortuny Miró

at 8:17 pm

In his introduction to the film inside the own film Jan Svankmajer compares modern societies with a lunatics assylum: the subject of ” Lunacy ” is essentially an ideological debate about how to rule an institution. ” Basically there are two ways of managing an institution, and both equally extrem: one looks at the absolute freedom; the other, an old-fashioned based on absolute rules and punishment”. But we can find another -he concludes- that combines both of them and ” this is the mad- house in we’re living today “. As the ptotagonist of the film, as artists nowadays, modern democracies seem to move between two chairs, to walk behind the fog.

Placed in the nineteenth century rural France ” Lunacy ” is vaguely inspired by a not very popular tale by E. A. Poe titled ” The system of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether ” about a mad-house ruled by their patients and also by the decadentist and anticlerical criticism of Marquis de Sade. The result is a satirical and thought-provoking horror tale where Svankmajer conjugates cool stop-motion animation, kinky sex, black humour, gothic horror imaginery, disturbing analogies, circular nightmares, therapeutic burials, lunatics and meat puppets to built up a pessimistic political fable about mankind alienation and indecisiviness in industrializied societies.

Another masterpiece of this dark alchemist of the surreal .
Rating: 5 / 5