Cinema always contains contradictory forms: for every Western, there is a comedy of manners. In an era of slick, violent fantasy films, computer-generated from end to end, it appears that the polar opposite form, hand-made, artisanal stop-action movies, are enjoying a resurgence. Labor-intensive animated films of this sort have always co-existed uneasily (and most invisibly as well) with Hollywood paradigms -- throughout the last decades of the 20th century stop-action pictures by the Quay Brothers and Jan Svankmejer enjoyed some slight renown, movies made to oppose, it seemed, not only Disney but, also, big budget special-effects driven films. Now, it appears that the form is enjoying a mild sort of resurgence -- two Chilean films, surrealist exploration of the Pinochet era, have recently surfaced to some acclaim (these are The Bones and The Wolf House by Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina) and, at present,, there is a feature-length film on Netflix, The House (2021) that employs stop-action in all three of its related half-hour segments. The House is excellent of its kind and deserves study. When stop-action is used to animate something other than gorilla monsters and dinosaurs as in King Kong, or skeletal warriors (as in Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts), the effects are, often, claustrophobic and uncanny -- inert matter comes alive to writhe and gesture, but; nonetheless, retains its status as fundamentally inanimate stuff; these films exploit the idea of stillness as opposed to motion and can cut very close to the bone.
The House is built from three episodes, each seemingly made by a different director or combination of directors -- the credits list Emma de Swaef (a Swedish animator), Marc James Roel, Niki Lindroh von Bahr and Paloma Baeza as directors; I didn't make up these names -- this is how these people are identified. All episodes feature startling effects linked by the location in which the tales take place: A Palladian mansion, built in the 18th century, it seems, that appears in all three stories, albeit in stages of increasing dilapidation. I think the first two sections are better than the somewhat airy and scattered last story. The house, a stately manor that is strangely vertical - it rises like a white column on the wooded hilltop where it is built -- is imagined as a character in the film: it has oculus-shaped windows and a tower surmounted by an elaborate weather vane and lightning rod. The inside of the building is somewhat under-furnished, a series of dim, broad corridors and rooms full of plush velvet drapes.
In the first sequence, a poor family lives in a cottage near a wooded hill. The people are blobs of pinkish fabric with tiny close-set button eyes and they all look alike -- there's a harried father, a gentle mother, a ten or eleven-year-old girl and a baby named Isobel. At the start of the episode, some vicious relatives come to visit the family and mock their humble cottage. That night, the father gets drunk and wanders in the woods. A spectral hand-carried sedan appears -- its a bit like the conveyance in Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage -- occupied by a fat sinister cherub with flares of white hair on the sides of his head that make him look like Benjamin Franklin. This is Von Schoonbeek, the architect of the house. He has a weird whinnying laugh and a hysterical factotum named Thomas. The next day, before the father's hangover has subsided, Thomas appears and presents a contract to the father and mother -- Von Schoonbeek intends to build them a mansion on the wooded hill but only if they sign the contract. There are apparently no strings attached; von Schoonbeek wants to demonstrate his prowess as an architect and the poor family will be allowed to live in the manor without any expense. The house is built. Von Schoonbeek is like Frank Lloyd Wright -- he has designed the whole house and its furnishings and the family's humble tables and chairs (and an heirloom commode) are put in the storage in the basement; these things would otherwise clash with the decor. As one might expect, the home develops into a ghastly, incomplete labyrinth, full of remote rooms where the apparitions of workmen continue to hammer and saw wood. The stairs get removed and the little girl with the baby are trapped on the home's upper levels. The father and mother becomes obsessed with the house and are forced by the architect, who seems hiding in the woodwork, to wear bizarre costumes so that they fit in with the other furnishings in the house. After a variety of weird events, the parents are transformed, literally, into furniture. They have taken to burning their possessions from the cottage in the hearth and, when they burn the little girl's dollhouse (which is a tiny model of the manor), the mansion takes fire itself -- the parents, who are now just chairs, are burned up but the little girl and the baby escape. This is an uncanny segment relying upon the imagery of the haunted house -- the mansion seems to have endless chambers and cellars below cellars and its full of ghostly apparitions. The sequence is quite frightening and remorselessly depicts how the possession of a place can lead to madness.
The second story takes place in the present. A rat has acquired the house, now located in a genteel suburb, and is refurbishing it. The rat, who is dressed like a carpenter, intends to flip the place and make a lot of money. But there are problems -- the place is infested with "fur beetles" (they are like cockroaches) and their larvae. And the remodeling project, which is leveraged to the hilt, is going poorly. Finally, the rat gets the house ready for a showing. He arranges for prospective buyers to inspect the property en masse, offering them canapes and champagne. But the roaches keep emerging and much of the remodeling seems a bit gimcrack. (The place has lighting that you can manipulate from your cell-phone and the "last slab of marble quarried from Carrera" in its kitchen.) Throughout this ordeal, the poor rat-developer had been living in the basement. No one is interested in the house except for a gruesome-looking couple, a very tall female rat wrapped up in what looks like a cocoon with her fat almost spherical-looking husband. (The shapes of this uncanny figures imitate the round bodies of the roaches and the long, narrow forms of their larvae.) This couple indicates that they are "extremely interested in the house" but don't agree to buy it -- they just move in and make themselves at home. The roaches take over and there is an elaborate Busby Berkeley-style dance number featuring the beetles forming kaleidoscopic patterns as they overrun the house to the tune of sinister dance music. Then, the intruders invite their family for a visit. Now, the house is full of aggressive bugs and huge numbers of nasty-looking rodents. The place is trashed and the hero, driven mad, strips off his clothing and crawls through his rotisserie oven into a dirty burrow in the earth. The rat, who dreamed he was a gentrifying contractor, is now just a common rodent, scuttling through the filth.
In the last sequence, the characters are all cats. The setting is post-apocalyptic -- the house stands on an island surrounded by vast lagoon in which bits of buildings peek out over the still waters. Now, the house is a low-rent maze of studio apartments, but in bad condition -- the tap water runs brown and the wall paper won't stay put on the walls. Floor boards are collapsing and the whole place seems on the brink of ruin. The cat landlady, Rosa, has two tenants, Elias (who pays her in fish dragged out of the lagoon) and Jen, a New Age mystic who is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her boyfriend, a man-cat she met at a retreat for Tibetan throat singers. (Jen pays the landlady in obsidian crystals.) The landlady (like the hapless rat) has an elaborate plan for refurbishing the place, but there's no funds for the project. The New Age cat-lady's boyfriend agrees to do handy-man work in the building. But the waters are rising and he knows that boats will be needed. And, so, he rips up the floorboards on the upper level to fashion to sailboat so that Elias can escape -- he and his girlfriend intend to leave by the sailboat on which he has arrived. The waters keep rising. The tenants all depart by sailboat. Left to her devices, the landlady, Rosa, presses a big lever and this transforms the battered mansion into a kind of big sea-going vessel. All alone in the house, she sets sail for parts unknown.
The first two stories have very complex undertones and are full of interesting inexplicable details. They have something to do with this proposition: we don't own property, it owns us. There are strangely intimate family details in the first story involving the deterioration of the parents and their relationship with their daughters. (The episode isn't flawless -- the detail of the elaborate commode that the poor family owns, the only thing in which they take pride, is, as the Germans say, a blindes Motiv (a "blind motif") that goes nowhere. It seems pretty clear that the parents were going to burn the commode in the hearth at the mansion -- at least, this was the design -- but, instead, burn the little girl's dollhouse which mirrors the structure of the manor.) The second sequence is full of bravura effects that are both fascinating and disgusting; the revelation that that the rat-developer with all his hopeless pretensions is just, after all, a common rodent has a Kafkaesque power. The third sequence is less dire; it's picturesque but doesn't infest your imagination like the first two parts of the movie. Nonetheless, the entire film is challenging, fun to watch, and, frequently, brilliant.
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