Invention For Destruction

 

 

One Good Verne
Deserves Another

Invention For Destruction
aka Vynález zkázy
aka The Fabulous
World Of Jules Verne
Czechoslovakia 1958
Directed by Karel Zeman
Second Run Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Invention For Destruction is the second Karel Zeman film I’ve seen in a couple of weeks and, once again, I’m pretty impressed. This one sees the Czechoslovakian surrealist going more and more artificial with his world view and I can see how future directors such as Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson (bringing the Zissou) may well have been influenced by his style.

It’s based on For the Flag, a novel by Jules Verne (one of my favourite writers although, I have to say, I’ve not read this one) and while I was initially disappointed that the director had chosen to shoot this in black and white, I soon realised this is because the whole film is supposed to look like one of the original woodcut illustrations of that book come to life. So it was filmed in Zeman’s brilliant hodge-podge process which was energetically touted at the time as mysti-mation. Frankly, mysti-mation is about as useful and honest a movie making bit of hyperbole as terms like Tohoscope, Supermarionation or Dynamation but, that’s okay, I love silly terms like this and can’t get enough of them.

So basically, the film is a combination of stop motion animation, puppetry, flat cut out illustrations and live action on sets made to look like those illustrations. And I have to say, it’s so well done that I was completely taken in, at first, as to how the man managed to get the actors to move around the drawings without any matte lines or whatever showing. It was only after a minute or two, when I realised a shadow was being cast by an actor's arm on the drawings, that I realised that a lot of it was a built set with giant sized versions of the illustrated cut outs for the actors to move around in. Also, there are clever and cost effective combinations where some of the cutouts in, say, the foreground layers of the frames are obviously smaller drawings put in front of the sets and actors before the camera and, well, it somehow all looks like it’s the same scale, or certainly gives the illusion of it. It can’t have been easy to do to get all those crosshatched lines and details to match up as well as they do here. There’s some amazing sets with a wonderful homage, at one point, to a certain shot in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (no, not the shot you’re immediately thinking of when I say that) and the costumes worn by the actors and actresses are wonderfully flat and patterned and also completely blend in with the wonderful sets and illustrations (the sets and costumes were painted with the lines from specially made roller brushes).

I was totally bowled over by this small tale of a plot by a Nemo-like Count to kidnap a professor and bankroll the scientist’s new explosive energy force invention so he can use it for a super canon to threaten the world with. The actors are all superb in this, reacting quite naturally to their ‘beyond artifical’ environments and it includes, despite what I said in my earlier review of Zeman’s Journey To The Beginning Of Time (read that one here), that sense of the appreciation and wonder of certain parts of the environment by a couple of the adult characters, that was a more natural reaction for the kids in the previous film... but which manages to carry over a little into this one too.

Also, the score by Zdenek Liska works very well with the action of the thing... almost like it’s doing old style Hollywood Mickey Mousing with the cues but often responding to the camera movement within the environment, rather than necessarily trying to catch any action captured within the content of the frame. For instance, there’s a truly wonderful series of establishing shots by Zeman, at one point, of the camera zooming into an illustration of the building, then cutting and doing a similar zoom of the building from a different angle and... then again a third time and going through a window into the next scene. Each time the camera swoops towards the building, Liska catches those with musical flourishes of his own. It’s a nice moment.

It’s also a very inventive and the surrealistic ideas which are presumably added in, a lot of the time, by Zeman’s fertile imagination, are charming pieces of on-screen surrealism which make the film a pleasure to watch. For instance, there’s a scene where the head bad guy aims his flintlock and it misfires. That’s because it’s a clockwork flintlock and, as soon as he winds it up with the key on the handle, a steady stream of shells are projected from the weapon like it’s a miniature, hand held machine pistol. Yeah, lots of great ideas here such as strange, floating air tanks kitted out to be underwater bicycles (with little bells ‘a ringing’), an underwater sword fight between two divers and, worth the price of admission alone, a small group of roller-skating camels. I mean, wow, what more could you ask for.

There’s even a nice sequence when the hero’s oxygen tank is running out, as he’s trying to escape his captors underwater, where two fish swim together and both hit a vertical, invisible join and swim behind it so only the ends of their tails remain. Those two halves of juxtaposed tails have then formed a butterfly which flies away under the ocean... this flight of fancy used to underline that the character is hallucinating while running out of oxygen. Again, lovely stuff.

Not much more for me to say about Invention For Destruction except that I wish these movies were better known over here because they’re perfect to catch children with at a certain age. I was totally blown away again by this one and Second Run have included some nice extras on here including two of Zeman’s short films. I’m really looking forward to seeing his 1962 film, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen next and the review of that one should be appearing here in a couple of days time. Meanwhile, if you’re a fan of cinema and the way live action and animated work can be combined effectively on screen, definitely check this one out sometime.