Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman: Storm of Craft

Zeman’s next film, Invention for Destruction, based largely on Jules Verne’s atomic-bomb-forecasting intrigue Facing the Flag and also roping other Verne-isms into its story, is where what we can call the Zemanesque authentically explodes, from the swarm of airships and submarines and subterranean cities to the (largely animated) deep-sea divers sword-fighting underwater and the giant octopus killed in a blooming black cloud of blood and ink. But Zeman’s textures are the money: even the sea rocks at night and the pounding engine pistons are made by classic-engraving draftsmanship, and the roiling sea is evoked with undulating pen marks, all of it both 2D and 3D at once; the uncanny mixture of layers and effects and forced perspectives is so carefully and inventively executed, it generates a sense of fanciful astonishment that has almost nothing to do with the story. In a predigital world, Zeman seems to have had no problem putting whatever he wanted wherever he wanted it, and almost every shot virtually insists that you look away from the actors and examine every rococo surface around them. Zeman’s bald-faced recycling of the steel engravings from the original 1896 edition of Facing the Flag, by master artiste and chronic Verne illustrator Léon Benett, among a heap of other recommissioned nineteenth-century artworks, fuses gorgeous old-fashioned artisanship with state-of-the-art special effects, and the result, moment to moment, is a plastic dream that resists easy assignation. This strange state of being for the viewer is gloriously compounded by the intoxicating proto-film-within-a-film scene, in which the evil submarine captain watches, via a kind of mega-phenakistoscope, pilfered newsreely films (all animated engravings), in which British colonials ride roller-skating camels and an airship drops bombs on the captain’s own ship. Geek-out meta-moments rarely come as confident and breathlessly designed.

Released internationally as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, Invention for Destruction is thought to be the most successful Czechoslovak film ever made. It’s easy to see why; part of all of his films’ pleasure is the palpable sense that Zeman, whatever his other aims and concerns, was manufacturing these head trips for the sheer love of it—they made him happy. That bliss is felt most clearly in The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, another ur-Zemanic feast of invention, this time in exuberant color, often by way of retro tinting, that exploits Raspe’s tall tales (credited in the film to their German translator and popularizer, Gottfried August Bürger) for their intrinsic, zesty aimlessness. As undisturbed by history or science or reality as the baron himself, the film begins, Verne-ishly, with proto-astronauts meeting the eponymous yarn master on the moon, and lollygags through his discursive, chaotic avalanche of artful baloney in a way that feels far more like pretend-play than narrative progression. (The fastidiously black-and-white Invention for Destruction, in contrast, is structured by Verne’s clockwork plotting and represents the other extreme—though both films are unmistakably the product of one mind.) The Fabulous Baron Munchausen’s dazzling, detouring cataract of byzantine foofaraw, animated rocket ships and flying cannonballs, stock shots of ice floes and sea anemones, vividly drafted 3D palace rooms and dirigibles—light-footed even when it isn’t funny, but it’s often very funny—feels perfectly simpatico with the lack of conventional storytelling momentum. While you’re watching, it’s hard not to wish you were the child Zeman must have had in mind while making it, the kind of kid who doesn’t grow anxious about chaos and randomness and perhaps naturally bristles at the authority of order, instead surrendering most happily when things are getting curiouser and curiouser. You could say—would Zeman, a daydream carpenter stuck in the logical madness of Communism?—that the world can be divided into these two types of people, the clenched control seekers and the curious explorers, and that as a culture many of our problems would be resolved if the latter cabal had a chance to take over. Zemaniacs of the world, rise!

The Méliès-spawned tribe of wonder seekers would in Zeman’s wake come to include Larry Jordan and Walerian Borowczyk as well as Gilliam, of course, but Zeman has had no direct imitators to speak of, such is the over­whelming and distinctive intensity of his style, his retro obsessions, and his capa­bilities with camera effects. Even he had to give up on making the kinds of films that made him famous, once the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia installed new restrictions on production, and also once effects technology got to a point (around the time of 2001: A Space Odyssey, some have speculated) that made Zeman’s work seem antique in a not-good way, even to the man himself. After finishing his last big production, 1970’s On the Comet, under Soviet scrutiny, and turning sixty, Zeman spent the seventies holed up in Zlín doing straight-up tabletop animations only. Whatever the circumstances, it’s not difficult to imagine that the filmmaker, a man in general disassociation from the present-moment culture in which he lived, became too aware of being a figure out of sync, and of having pop cinema pass him by.

The present was accelerating, and no one cared much for yesteryear fantasias any longer. (Unless, that is, by way of steampunk, which Zeman nearly invented.) In any case, Zeman is one of the few filmmakers—Sergei Parajanov is another—whose films look as though they were fashioned, impossibly, in the precinematic past; if Verne and Benett had been able to make movies in 1873, something like Invention for Destruction would’ve resulted. (Consider how both Zeman and Parajanov, like impassioned flea marketeers, fill their movies with heaps of old things—ancient bric-a-brac, signifying detritus—challenging us to scan every tableau and note each tarnished object.) It’s a demanding strategy, for us as well as the filmmaker, and like the movies of Wes Anderson (to offer up perhaps Zeman’s most beloved contemporary inheritor), Zeman’s works can be exhausting, even at their relatively brief running times. There is, certainly, too much stuff to see at once, and too much to grab hold of in a single screening; it’s as if each movie begs to be turned back into a book, a huge coffee-table volume in which every dizzying image is frozen and made timelessly available for contemplative study. You can imagine the filmmaker sighing over each concocted frame, and regretting the speed with which it must sail past our eyes. (And the frames do sail—Zeman liked brisk cutting.) You could think of this sensibility as a triumphant sense of bespokeness—a stubborn belief in the primacy of handmade things, during an Age of Plastic otherwise fascinated with machine-stamped products and commercial homogenization. From where we sit today—in a six-walled mediaverse where no image reaches us without being glossified by digital manipulation—Zeman’s films, already engineered to resound with polished antiqueness, feel even more artifactual. In their day, they were loving salutations to the skylarking reveries of a much-missed nineteenth century. Now, they’re treasure chests spilling forth beautiful evidence of the much-missed twentieth-century moment in which such remembering, and imagining, was a vital act of happy defiance.