The films have some variety - they're in B&W and color and the style of animation stretches from simple manipulation of clay to the bizarre utilization of household vegetables. What they have in common is a unique disturbing quality. Some shorts, like The Flat use pixillated live actors, while others replace people with puppets of varying styles. Down to the Cellar's haunted little girl, discovering various subterranean terrors below her house, looks like an inspiration for Tim Burton.

Even the shorts that might seem basic, aren't. A Game With Stones soon develops from animating rocks on a tabletop to much more complicated patterns. The intricate musical 'soundscapes' on these pictures add to their disturbing atmosphere.

Svankmajer is clearly an enthusiastic Edgar Allan Poe fan. A morbid flavor runs through many of these shorts and two full-on Poe interpretations. The Usher adaptation is kind of a free-form background to the story, which mostly just creeps around the dark house while we listen to the text. But the Pit is a harrowing version faithful to the tone and events in the original story itself. Svankmajer has his pendulum blade appear from a skull painted on the ceiling of the torture pit, a nice visual touch.

The overtly political films are downright creepy. Meat Love has two slices of beef conduct a very brief affair with a violent end. It's funny and perverse at the same time. Dimensions of Dialogue (pictured on the box cover) is a nightmarishly complex visual statement showing 'interactions' between people bizarrely constructed from food and desktop objects. One or both are rearranged or pulverized with each 'conversation,' and reform in a new configuration. Like many of the films, it's menacing in an indefinable way. Another more directly menacing film shows clay men being manufactured on an assembly line, immediately hanged, and returned to the clay bucket for reprocessing.

The most elaborate political picture obviously couldn't be made until the fall of the Soviet Union. The Death of Stalin in Bohemia breaks up a fast montage of historical stills and collage material with gruesome repetitions of 'surgery' on a bust of Stalin. Splitting the statue in two, a surgeon pushes through entrails to reveal a new dictator inside. Even when repainted with the Czech flag, the extinct Stalin persists in spirit.

Kino and KimStim's DVD of The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer is a 2-disc set, with the fourteen short subjects handsomely transferred. The box designs are rather plain and the dull green of the packaging is not all that eye-pleasing. This isn't the kind of disc that will attract casual viewers in a DVD store.

Disc One comes with brief but interesting galleries of Svankmajer drawings, puppets and ceramics; a Zeitgeist trailer for Little Otik, a Svankmajer feature that looks as if it were born of parentage fear; an illustrated poem and a couple of text bios.

Disc Two's galleries are of 'collages, cabinetry (fanciful, creepy exhibits for a secret museum), and an image lexicon of more grotesque drawings. Another illustrated poem prededes a 26-minute, slow-starting BBC docu on Svankmajer's aggressive, violent and disturbing work, using many audio recordings from the director. He stresses his background in magic and puppet theater and his delight in using film to break down reality, a disturbing act in itself. He also considers all of his films to be politically committed, and realizes that the time-specific images in many of them will become meaningless in fifty years.

The docu helps distill the basic surrealist in Svankmajer. He deals with re-ordering familiar objects in disturbing patterns, finding horror and truth along the way. Dimensions of Dialogue, for instance, starts with destructive - looking invasions between people. When two animated clay people blend into one another, it first seems like another horror image - until it begins to express the desire for lovers to stop being individual creatures and meld together.

The docu also relates Svankmajer to an old artistic movement called 'mannerism' and shows old paintings that create face-collages of fruit and vegetables, a familiar theme in the shorts seen here.

Viewers need to be warned that the BBC docu shows the slaughering and dressing of a pig as part of the production background of The Death of Stalin in Bohemia.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Animator of Prague BBC Docu; Svankmajer artwork, poems; filmograpy & biography, essay
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: July 6, 2005