The Ossuary

While I am a big lover of the films of Jan Svankmajer, I am not blinded to the fact that occasionally he was NOT as his best...and that clearly can be said about "The Ossuary". While the setting is amazing and make the film worth seeing, the filmmaker's techniques in this particular film are distracting and just plain bad. I know Svankmajer fans would blanch at me saying this, but the film seemed cheap and poorly made.

There is a crypt in old Czechoslovakia that contains the bones of 70,000 people. But the monks decided to arrange the skulls and skeletons in amazingly ornate and creepy ways...such as a chandelier made up of these parts. I've seen pictures and documentaries about it before...but none like this film. Instead of showing it in the usual way, the film looks as if was made with an 8mm camera and the edits are intentionally annoying and awful. All this is narrated by a rather boring guide who is about as compelling to listen to as a dog with adenoids...accompanied with the rattling of bones. All in all, this is a case where the film couldn't help but be interesting but somehow Svankmajer, in an odd fluke, makes the absolute least of it. A very disappointing short film.

In "The Ossuary", Jan Svankmajer shows that while he was still in his preliminary stages of filmmaking, the styles he utilized in his earliest works would ultimately become extremely important to his work later on. This 1970 work does not make use of any animation as later became the director's trademark, and is more of a documentary than an avant-garde short, but the absolute most is made of the setting he had to work with, and it is executed to perfection as a result. Most of this is due largely to the camerawork, which is sometimes non-stationary and other times moves controlled by stop-motion - essentially the only use of the technique seen in the entire movie.

The ten-minute film documents a historic chapel, famous for the fact that the various decorations and ornaments inside the place are made entirely of human bones. The setting alone is interesting enough to make the film work, but the creative editing and camerawork brings the setting to life in a crazy way. Little actually happens, and the soundtrack itself consists entirely of a Spanish-speaking narrator talking about the history (apparently), but Svankmajer made the most of what he had to work with and the result is a truly amazing meditation on death.

Svankmejer made a diversion from his vivid world to make this short , mostly non-narrative film. We are taken on a journey to one of the most horrificly spellbinding building in the world , which has been made from the skull's,rib's,legs,breastbones etc etc of thousands of bodies, to form the arches and doorways and to generally adorne this building.. With frantic jump cuts , a soundtrack that seems to ring in the ears for hours afterward and his own style give us a truly original way of seeing this macabre building. Watch this and then go for a walk in the woods , alone.

So many curious stuff in such a short time.

• a school visit to an ossuary, presumably the largest in the world, where 70,000 human skeletons are arranged into elaborate ornaments. It seems the entire suffering of Czech history is represented here. Black Death, the 15th century Hussite wars, tortures, religious purgings.

• the ossuary as mass grave, church, and art gallery, where the visitor may puzzle over his reactions to the grotesque spectacle. To be sanctimoniously solemn or to marvel? Is what we see a collection of relics or exhibits?

• a funny remark about an American who offered to pay $100,000 to purchase a chandelier made of skulls and bones.

• the rather amusing imprudence of the kids who are not phased by any of this, and will write with ballpoint pens on the skulls, much to the tour guide's irritation.

• the man responsible for the art here, who spent 10 years of his life down there arranging human bones to a monument of flowery death. Devotional obsession as pursued at the close proximity of death. Of course the images Svankmajer captures of this, the textures and fractures.

Some great horror movies could be made around this place. Perhaps this is one of them.

I've seen many films by Jan Svankmajer, short and feature and I like them all but the most astounding film of all and since couple of days ago, my favorite is "The Ossuary"(1970).

"The Ossuary" is the most stunning, disturbing, masterful and creative short film even for Svankmajer. I usually would stay away from the words THE MOST but "The Ossuary" deserves the epithet for the unique subject matter which is a voyage inside the Sedlec Ossuary, a small chapel located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic with an actual tour-guide (or rather a substitute for a tour guide) who tells the story of the Ossuary to the group of middle school students. The ossuary contains approximately 40,000 human skeletons which have been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel. During the Black Death in the mid 14th century, and after the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century many thousands of people were buried there.

In 1870, František Rint, a woodcarver, was employed by the Schwarzenberg family to arrange the bones of 40,000 people or so artistically and orderly. What he had created with the help of his wife and two children is the most disturbing, macabre, ominous and unsettling works of art I've ever seen: four enormous bell-shaped mounds occupy the corners of the chapel. A huge chandelier of bones, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, hangs from the center of the nave with garlands of skulls draping the vaults. The guide proudly informed the audience that the USA government had offered the Czechoslovakia government $100, 000 for chandelier but the offer was declined. The signature of Master Rint and the year 1870 carved in bone can be seen on he wall near the entrance.

In 1970, the centenary of Rint's contributions, Jan Švankmajer was commissioned to make a "cultural documentary" about the ossuary. The result was a 10 minute long nightmare of the images that could be compared to the darkest and most pessimistic works in the history of Art. Bosch's "Inferno" looks like a sitcom next to the quiet and silence horrors of the artistically and lovingly arranged human bones and sculls that would never for a second let a mesmerized viewer forget about decay and death. Svankmajer did not have to create any hellish nightmarish images or visions - all he had to do - to let his camera go wild in capturing the never stopping and never ending Dance of Death.

Absolutely fascinating, terrifying, and unforgettable.