A Game with Stones 

(1965) 

- original title: Hra s Kameny - by Jan Švankmajer uses a motif of clocks and stones, accompanied by bizarre sounds and a xylophone/music box score. Emphasis on the dichotomy of black and white.

A Game With Stones is essentially a very early trial run for Jan Švankmajer's later pessimist masterpiece Dimensions of Dialogue, rehearsing the themes of human evolution and self-destruction that would be so eloquently and powerfully stated in the later film. This earlier stab at similar material is, unsurprisingly, rougher and broader, though it has the same relentless, rhythmic drive as so many of Jan Švankmajer's animations. Also like many of the director's other films, the structure is rigidly divided into distinct sections, each one representing a progression from the last, a variation on the kinds of games that can be played with the titular stones. The film utilizes a very simple set-up: every few hours, a spigot regulated by a clock (whose ticking provides a metronome-like soundtrack to the film) drips out a few stones into a bucket dangling below the clock. Once in the bucket, the stones enact a series of ritualized, dance-like movements, increasing in complexity with each iteration, before the bucket turns over, dropping the stones on the ground. As a metaphor for human existence, it's blunt and obvious, not to mention disarmingly negative: the rocks, inanimate stand-ins for the world's inhabitants, end their brief moments of play and experimentation by getting tossed into the discard heap without ceremony.


The first group of rocks, a black stone and a white stone, enact only the simplest of permutations, subdividing into smaller pebbles and arranging themselves into neat rows of alternating colors, or else dividing the screen in half vertically between black columns and white columns. Each time the spigot dispenses more stones, there is more diversity of colors and textures, as well as more variety in the kinds of movements and patterns that the stones engage in. There is something increasingly sensuous, even sexual, about the subsequent patterns, with stones rubbing against one another, sometimes seeming to birth torrents of smaller rounded stones from the frictive collisions of the larger rocks. Soon, the rocks form into humanoid shapes, complete with exaggerated external genitals and breasts, while Svankmajer simultaneously delves inside the body, creating patterns of skeletal systems and internal organs that seem to be pulsing, breathing like lungs taking in air. Having achieved this humanoid form, the rocks then begin pushing towards destruction. In the next segment, an obvious precursor to the mutually devouring automatons of Dimensions of Dialogue, the rocks are crushed into thin silt, filling the screen like the accumulated rock layers that make up the fossil record below the Earth's surface. This already suggests the destruction, the passing of humanity into history, and Svankmajer drives the metaphor home by creating human faces from out of the rock dust, faces that alternate between tenderly kissing and violently absorbing one another.

The final sequence brings this progression to its logical conclusion. Here, the playful games and interactions of the stones become truly violent and destructive, with fierce collisions resulting in cracked and shattered stones. Svankmajer's editing, brutally fast throughout the film, reaches its apogee here, with brisk, visceral cutting that accentuates the violence of this final game. The end result, the destruction of the bucket that holds the stones and thus the disruption of the cycle, is apparently Svankmajer's vision of apocalypse, an apocalypse for which the world's inhabitants must take full responsibility. Of course, despite this bleak symbolic message, Svankmajer's animations retain a certain whimsical appeal, a playfulness and sense of visual excitement that is never quite submerged by the director's thematic darkness.

Source: Only The Cinema

 

 

A Game with Stones, 2nd generation, kugeln, handmade, Film

Reading

Notation. Calculation and Form in the Arts (2008) is a comprehensive catalogue (in German) edited by Dieter Appelt, Hubertus von Amelunxen and Peter Weibel which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin and the ZKM | Karlsruhe. (ZKM)

Sons et Lumières (2004) – A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century (in French) by Marcella Lista and Sophie Duplaix published by the Centre Pompidou for the excellent Paris exhibition in September 2004 until January 2005.


Curated by the Pompidou’s Sophie Duplaix with the Louvre’s Marcella Lista, the show required a good three or four hours to absorb, with its bombardment of sensory and intellectual input, including painting, sound sculpture, sound/light automata, film and video, and room-size installations. (Frieze Magazine)

 

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