Metrograph

The Czechoslovak affinity for emphasizing the most disturbing elements of classic children’s tales—see also: Jan Švankmajer’s Alice—is very much in evidence in Barta’s bleak retelling of the traditional German yarn, which is, after all, concerned with something like a mass extinction event. With a visual vocabulary that draws from medieval Flemish painting, Cubism, and German Expressionism, Barta plunges us into a grotesque rattletrap world of wood and metal puppets existing side by side with real live vermin and “communicating” in a nonsense tongue. An indelibly strange, profoundly pessimistic work. Screens with Barta’s The Vanished World of Gloves, a brief history of the cinema as illustrated by the titular garments.

The Pied Piper (Jiří Barta, 1986, 53 mins)

The Vanished World of Gloves (Jiří Barta, 1982, 16 mins)

THE PIED PIPER and THE VANISHED WORLD OF GLOVES restored by Deaf Crocodile Films in collaboration with Krátký Film Praha and The Comeback Company.

Introduction by filmmaker Daria Kascheeva on Saturday, April 18th