The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope

It's one of Jan Svankmajer's least comprehensible short films, and I think that also makes it one of his best. The vibes are so bad throughout, making this often feel like a nightmare put to film. And sure, you can say that about many of his short films, but you can really say it about this one.

It's easy to talk about the visuals in just about any given Svankmajer film, but here I'm realising that the audio is just as distinct. I don't know what he does to have all his short films sound this particular way, but it's just hit me here, more than any other short film of his.

The Pit, the Pendulum, and Hope unnerved me in just about the best way possible. What a trip.

This little film is mesmerizing. It is a stark recreation of Poes' Pit and the Pendulum. A man, whose face we never see, has been sentenced to death by some sort of druids or the inquisition. We follow him as he tries to save himself, using every means he has at his disposal. It is wildly surrealistic and very intense.

"The Pit and the Pendulum and Hope" shares a common quality of Jan Svankmajer's earlier work: its use of live-action. Svankmajer, generally speaking, was an animator: a filmmaker who made use of everyday objects as well as antiques and other junk to create surreal stop-motion shorts. This film is indeed surreal (the source material also was, although I heard it too long ago to be able to remember the whole thing) yet it is not about stop-motion at all, preferring to focus on the object of darkly depicting Poe's story. Not a bad thing necessarily, just very much similar to how his earliest shorts were filmed - little stop-motion, more live-action centered - and it's interesting to see him directly adapting a story without incorporating a large amount of his own animated additions.

In terms of pulling off the darkness of the story, Svankmajer succeeds masterfully. The setting of the film itself is reason enough to view it: an underground cavern full of man-made corridors. The camerawork is another large plus, as the film shows with a sense of impending doom, the pendulum swinging back and forth, and also carries the following events from the POV of the protagonist (which I rather liked). Strangely, there is no intense music, just the natural sound, which might be a plus in the long run even if it seems sort off cheap and careless at first. All in all, the film's main goal seems to be about visual interest through its intriguing camerawork and setting. It is not necessarily terrifying for a modern horror fan, but very well made as it is and worth seeing.

In one of two adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories - the other was an adaptation of "The Fall of the House of Usher" - Jan Svankmajer puts his own spin on things. This adaptation of "The Pit and the Pendulum" is nothing like the campy Vincent Price version. "Kyvadlo, jama a nadeje" has a really horrific feel. Aside from the fact that we see the pendulum from the protagonist's POV, we also see the gears running it; sort of like seeing the man behind the curtain in that respect. But even after the pendulum, there's still more for him to experience.

I agree with a previous reviewer who compared this movie to "2001: A Space Odyssey", how it looks at technology taking over (in that respect, we could also add "A Clockwork Orange"). Definitely worth seeing.

An imprisoned man finally escapes from an underground torture chamber. A relentlessly grim and oppressive rendition – comparable, in fact, to Alexandre Astruc's definitive TV version from 1964 – but the source material's despairing prose is sorely missed throughout. Famed Czech animator Svankmajer would later lend his uniquely surreal hand to such literary classics as "Alice In Wonderland" and "Faust" but this initial stab – his second from Poe material – is decidedly less appealing despite its very brief running time. Although the original source material was a short story itself, it has often been opened up for its cinematic adaptations which range from the popular Roger Corman/Vincent Price classic from 1961 to the little-seen but not ineffective Stuart Gordon/Oliver Reed version from 1990.