krameyevrah I didn't know what to expect from this film and so I sat back with an open mind and pressed play. From start to finish I barely blinked as the fascinating, intriguing story unfolded before me. I couldn't guess what was going to happen and where all the connections would connect and as each new image appeared on the screen I sat open mouthed, entranced. It is odd and magical. It is bizarre and interesting. It is not porn, far from it ! Fetish maybe but fetish in a slightly magic mushroom infused yet very normal and mundane world. It had a profound effect on me. I enjoyed it immensely but it also exercised parts of my brain, it made me think, it was like a visual jigsaw puzzle you needed to do in your mind and it left me relaxed and with a smile. The film is an antidote for all the dialogue packed, slick action, enormous budget blockbusters that shout at you from the screen. This film does not shout at you. It takes you by the hand and sees if you will be disgusted, asks you to look but checks to see if you'll look away. It's hard to describe to someone exactly what the films about. Show them, it's easier. Not everyone will like it but that's art for you. I loved it !

Leofwine_draca My second Svankmajer film, following on from SURVIVING LIFE (which I hated). This one's a lot more fun, a truly surrealist movie that explores the world of the sexual fetish, without actually involving the sex act too much. So we get a story involving a bunch of crazy people who are turned on by bread balls, by brushes, and plenty more besides.It's a truly outlandish film made by a crazed but great mind, and it hangs together surprisingly well for a movie containing no dialogue. The various narratives tie together well, making no sense at the outset but gradually coming together for a breathtaking climax. The level of imagination is through the roof, and there are tons of great visual images here; it gets particularly good when the stop motion comes into it.A film not for all tastes perhaps, but a rewarding experience for those with open minds all the same.

Prokievitch Bazarov To describe Jan Svankmajer's film ''Conspirators of Pleasure'' as a live-action cartoon is a little like calling James Joyce's ''Ulysses'' a salty Irish yarn. One of the world's most renowned animators, Mr. Svankmajer, a Czech, is a surrealist visionary whose movies featuring clay figures, marionettes, dolls and eerily life-infused everyday objects have the intensity of fiendishly witty nightmares. ''Conspirators of Pleasure,'' his mostly silent, third feature film, explores the secret erotic fantasies of a group of ordinary Prague residents whose paths are continually crossing. Although it has its quotient of dolls and mannequins, it features six actors whom the director manipulates like animated characters. As they go about their daily routines, they furtively accumulate a bizarre assortment of items that they use to act out elaborately kinky autoerotic rites. Mr. Peony (Peter Meissel), a mild-mannered bachelor, asks his next-door neighbor Mrs. Loubalova (Gabriela Wilhelmova) to slaughter a chicken for him. After using the carcass as a model to construct a papier-mache rooster's head from torn-up pornographic photos, he glues on the chicken feathers and fashions bat wings out of cut-up umbrellas. Donning the rooster head, into which he has carved eye holes, and strapping on the bat wings, he metamorphoses into a ludicrous predatory bird that murders a life-size effigy of the woman next door by levitating and dropping a papier- mache rock onto her head. Mrs. Loubalova harbors a similarly homicidal lust for Mr. Peony. In a quasi-religious ceremony conducted in a candlelit crypt, she first whips, then drowns his effigy by repeatedly dunking its head into a basin. The solo rituals of four other obsessive fantasists are interwoven with those of Mr. Peony and Mrs. Loubalova. Mrs. Malkova (Barbora Hrzanova), the neighborhood mail deliverer, shreds the insides of a loaf of bread into round little balls that she voraciously sucks into her nose through tubes. Mr. Kula (Jiri Labus), the newspaper vendor from whom Mr. Peony buys his girlie magazines, constructs a Rube Goldberg-like contraption attached to his television set that massages him when his favorite news announcer, Mrs. Beltinska (Anna Wetlinska), delivers the nightly news. While he ardently kisses the screen on which she appears, she achieves orgasmic bliss by having her toes sucked by two pet fish concealed under her desk in a tub. Meanwhile, her husband, the police commissioner (Pavel Novy), sneaks off to indulge in his own masochistic rite, vigorously scrubbing his body with rolling pins covered with feathers and nails. ''Conspirators of Pleasure,'' whose final credits acknowledge inspirations that include Sigmund Freud, Max Ernst, Luis Bunuel and the Marquis de Sade, is seriously funny and cheekily subversive. In having its six characters be ordinary people with extraordinary fantasies, the film portrays the erotic impulse of everyday life as a wild, chaotic, antisocial force that lends people their sense of individuality. But Mr. Svankmajer's vision is much more than a surrealistic rendering of standard Freudian notions of repression and sublimation. Encountering one another through the day, these obsessive ritualists exchange the sly, knowing glances of conspirators in a political plot. Not only do they recognize one another as ''freaks,'' to use contemporary parlance, but their unquenchable perversity also unites them in a shared resistance to the puritanical conformism of Eastern European culture (or at least that culture before the fall of Communism). Their pleasure-seeking also involves covert collaboration. For example, the bread balls that Mrs. Malkova sucks into her nostrils feed the fish that nibble on Mrs. Beltinska's toes. The technique of the film is as sly as its characters. At first you have no idea why these people are accumulating such an odd assortment of items. As the pace quickens, the film coaxes the viewer into becoming a voyeur and tacit collaborator in these pseudo-pornographic scenarios. Ultimately, a real crime is committed that eerily mirrors the zany erotic games that have come before. Having celebrated its characters' erotic fantasies, the movie reminds us that the line separating kinky fantasies from heinous real-life crimes can be awfully thin.

svankmaj This movie stirred a lot of feelings in me. I admit, I first saw it because I love Svankmajer and was enticed by the idea of men "stripping" in it. LOL It was fascinating to note that each character has his/her own musical theme attached. Too bad that if I wore the chicken head, no one would understand!But what got me was the two men Kula and Beltinsky. These guys actually turned me on, sad to say. Between the fact that they are the only people we get to see "naked" in the movie (interesting that Svankmajer avoids the genitalia!) and the fact that they give the most convincing orgasms, they practically got me aroused with them! Of course, I'm glad that the newsreader "orgasms" in the movie, so to point out that the men weren't completely sexually dominant, but I still find it fascinating that those men were able to climax in VERY believable fashions! (isn't it said somewhere that men can't give faked orgasms?)In addition, I loved the intimacy with which the camera explored both men's bodies. Even if the genitalia wasn't shown (it didn't necessarily NEED to be shown, as their voices were enough), the images of their feet, legs, buttocks, and chests was VERY enticing, as well as lovingly portrayed. Both men are considered to be "unattractive" by the masses, being "lumpy," overweight, and lacking in muscular tone. But I found them beautiful in the same natural way that people like James Broughton and Walt Whitman prove. I'm not sure if Svankmajer agrees, but he clearly shows the beauty of the male body in such sensual, loving and erotic ways. As a closing note, the guy playing Beltinsky has probably the most BEAUTIFUL feet of any Czech actor.Wow, can't believe I said all that, but then again, this movie DOES spark interesting feelings! ;) Write me if you feel similarly!