Fallen Art (2004)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

One of my all time favorites.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Tomasz Bagiński's "Sztuka spadania" ("Fallen Art" in English) poses the question of what constitutes glory amid war. The main character makes short movies featuring the dead bodies of soldiers pushed off of a springboard onto a slab of concrete. In short, he turns the soldiers' entire history into his own entertainment. I get the feeling that Bagiński made this as a reference to his own government's participation in the invasion of Iraq. Poland's government, like the rest of the governments in the so-called coalition of the willing, joined up with the invasion and occupation despite massive opposition among its population. I don't know how many people Poland lost in that most ill conceived of wars. There can be no doubt that it will weigh on the Poles' conscience for decades to come.Anyway, this is a good cartoon. The best cartoons are these short ones, as opposed to the features voiced by the celebrities of the moment.

I had to make a short presentation for a work not so long ago, using this short film as background and I was quite delighted with it. The fact that I didn't know any work of this filmmaker has led to even more my admiration. There was so much in so short time I could talk about, first with details that are immense, starting with the title, the fact of not having human speech, symbolisms, plus a multitude of them in this cyclical story without end, where everything fit together but you're not quite sure what the main message is. And therein lies the joke of what parallelism may exist with the days of yesterday, today and tomorrow, with different reading each one of us will have after seeing it. I really believe that the major objective of this short was achieved, have fun (yes, because although we are facing a very dramatic story, the humor isn't a foreign language) and bring all the ingredients for us to cook with our imagination and perhaps even more than that.

Boy, the artwork in this animated short is nothing short of fantastic. It was brilliant and made this "cartoon" fun to watch despite the sour message. The story is simply showing some huge military guy pushing a man to his death and then some real sicko getting excited seeing a dead body on the ground. It's sick stuff, sadly typical of almost all the material on this "Animation Show Volume 2" DVD. Gosh, what happened to the light and funny stuff? Meanwhile, any movie - short or feature length - that is blatantly anti-military, is pretty sure of getting an Academy Award nominee. Such is the Liberalness of the Academy, so it is no surprise that a short like this depicting military officers as deranged is going to be liked on the Left Coast (Hollywood).Having said that, though, I have to admit I was so captured by the visuals that I didn't really care about the morbid "story." The ultra-fat slob who was dancing to shots of the dead man actually was entertaining, thanks to the music. Still, one wonders why kind of demented brain produces material like this?

I enjoyed Fallen Art more than I did Kathedra (which I would rate 9/10). Kathedra was a stunning & visually elegant film with an interesting theme (The sublimation & petrification of the individual by religion. The mindless growth of religious entities towards the abyss.) Fallen Art has a more accessible & simpler animation style, as well as being extremely funny.Fallen Art is a comedy about tragedy; the tragedy which has defined human existence since the earliest civilizations. The desire to impose order/control via the application of violence. In a word, War. Most specifically, the process of War & the State. This process leads to a macabre form of Art, which becomes the justification for further death & destruction. This process is similar to the process of producing animation (although this analogy is limited as there is a director responsible for a film/animation). It is linked & sequential. It operates on a variety of levels which obscure who is really responsible for the product. Once a step is taken, the following steps are inevitable. No one is responsible as they are just playing their parts in the complex operation. No one accepts any blame for the results. And despite the result to human life, there is enthusiasm for both the process and the ultimate result, the Art of war.Like the best Eastern European animation, there are no intelligible words in the film. And none are needed. The words, "Blah, blah, blah", perfectly capture the "reason" of the process that leads soldiers to meaningless deaths. The smiley face medals are also apt.The real brilliance of Fallen Art is in the final product of the on-screen process, the hilarious dance film created from still photos of the soldiers who are booted to their deaths from the jump tower. In the same way that societies create "Value" from the destruction of their "Enemies" via entertaining propaganda, the meaningless destruction of the soldiers here becomes mass entertainment; a music video. The process of destruction MUST continue or the deaths of those who have already been sacrificed would become meaningless. But there is no real end to the process. The music doesn't really stop. Another chorus or verse can always be added.Even the frog, the voice of external reality, can only croak to record each new death splat.