A Game with Stones (1965) User Reviews

stoned...out of my mind

[lee_eisenberg · 7/10 · 27 August 2006]

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!

Early but still strange enough to be a Svankmajer film!

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 28 January 2013]

"Hra S Kameny" is one of Jan Svankmajer's earliest shorts. And, because it's so early, it isn't quite the weird style you might expect (it's not particularly creepy)--though it still weird. It's also difficult to describe, so it's one best seen. Using his usual stop-motion, Svankajer animates black and white (and later other color) stones--all set to the music of a music box. The oddest thing in the film is how huge stones appear to be coming out of a very small faucet. Otherwise, it consists of stones dancing about and not much more. It's all times very nicely to the music and a worthy early effort--but also the sort of film the average person would probably never watch or enjoy. So, it's definitely for huge Svankmajer fans who want to try to see everything this master animator has made. And, it's oddly hypnotic as well...

Motion of the earth.

[Polaris_DiB · 7/10 · 9 February 2010]

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

Mirage of stones

[chaos-rampant · 2 June 2011]

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.

Rock-solid

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 24 May 2015]

I apologize for the word play. This 8-minute movie from exactly 50 years ago (20 years after World War II) comes from one of Czech's most famous filmmakers: animation legend Jan Svankmajer. He was 30 years old when he made this and if you are a bit familiar with his work, you probably know what to expect. The director's focus in here are stone. He creates all kinds of beings, schemes and patterns out of stones, initially only very dark and very light ones all the same shape and size pretty much, but as the film goes on, we get to see basically every possible shape and size stones can have and Svankmajer is unstoppable in his creativity. It's like watching through a kaleidoscope, only that stones are not really that bright and colorful. I myself am probably not the biggest fan of his animation style, so this did not do too much for me, but it's really not a generalization, but a matter of personal taste.

Hypnotic Abstractions

[Tornado_Sam · 29 October 2019]

Jan Svankmajer's "A Game with Stones" shows that, even though it was made only three years after his first film, the filmmaker was already beginning to test the boundaries of his creative mind in the different things he could do with stop-motion animation. His first effort, "The Last Trick", utilized stop-motion but was not quite the creepy and surrealistic short most might expect; his second, "Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantastia G-moll" explored the concept of putting animated images to music; and his third, "Punch and Judy" contained little stop-motion but displayed the humorously bizarre mind of the maker. This film, like his second, explores putting music to images as well, but shows development of Svankmajer in that the animation is more complex and the visuals more interesting. It is also a little bit more his standard style compared to his first works.

The set-up is that a bucket - stationed below a clock - catches stones that are released from a small faucet every time the clock chimes. After each succession of stones drops into the bucket, the stones become animated as they dance around, break apart, and form shapes and figures. As another reviewer has pointed out, the style which Svankmajer utilizes to create the abstraction is very polished and quick, giving the short a hypnotic feel, and the music timing with the visual aspect is very well executed. As far as the set-up itself goes, it's a wonderfully entertaining abstraction for what it is, yet not, as others might say, as good as the filmmaker's later works.