Reviews & Ratings for
Hra s kameny More at IMDbPro »

7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
stoned...out of my mind, 27 August 2006

Author: Lee Eisenberg (eisenberg.lee@gmail.com) from Portland, Oregon, USA

As the first Jan Svankmajer movie that I ever saw, "Hra s kameny" (alternately called "Spiel mit Steinen" or "A Game with Stones") holds a special place. It shows stones dripping out of a faucet every quarter hour and doing a series of wacky dances, contortions, and whatnot. The kiss is especially impressive. As for the end, I guess that it's saying that all good things have to end eventually - although in this case, it sort of brought the end on itself.

All in all, I've heard how Jan Svankmajer's work is often bizarre (even subversive), but you truly have to see it to believe it. In conclusion, "rock" and roll!

Mirage of stones, 2 June 2011

Author: chaos-rampant from Greece

Though random at first, there is obvious pattern in the repetition here. Every time a cuckoo clock strikes 12, stones drip out of a faucet into a bucket. Then undergo various transformations, until dropped from the bucket on the floor below. The opening shots, which are cracks on the walls and floors as their own landscape, presages the meticulous attention to texture. So we initially have stones as as this symbolic duality of black and white, then stones animated as beings, then parts of the anatomy, then overall shapes as consisting of these smaller rocks, then their disintegration as they crack against each other. Finally the bucket breaks, which is a freedom of sorts and the next batch of stones do not have to go through the process of forms. What it precisely means though is unclear to me. I hope the other Svankmajers are more evocative.

Motion of the earth., 9 February 2010

Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Jan Svankmajer is certainly a material animator, he can look at something and give it a life and animation beyond your imagination. Sometimes I see young Svankmajer as a boy sitting on his bed, tracing the cracks in his Czech home, imagining entire adventures as if those cracks are Rorschach designs compelling imagery from him. Thus the first parts of this animation.

Anyway, this movie features a clock that periodically drops stones into a bucket, where they animate and take on various forms, including animals, bones, and faces. The animation is, simply stated, invisible, and it is difficult not to imagine the zones actually dancing and playing. However, as the stones trace a vague form of narrative in their advancement and population, eventually they break through the bottom of the bucket, providing a sort of temporary use or need for them.

In a way, Svankmajer literally makes men from the Earth, and then pulls their world out from underneath them.

--PolarisDiB

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