Diskzokej (1980) User Reviews

Animation design lends itself to commercialization despite the subject commentary

[Polaris_DiB · 6/10 · 12 November 2008]

Take this one with "The Club of the Laid Off", and one can see that Barta had a lot of disturbed fascination with consumerism and the turn Czechoslavakia took in the late 70s/early 80s.

The animation wins here. Barta makes a sort of mini-narrative out of what are for the most part primary shapes, circles, triangles, and squares. These shapes serve as dials, advertisements, buildings, meters, food, and of course discs. From a displaced first-person perspective the world is animated through the disc-jockey's eyes.

However, even with the stripped-down animation, the drug-addiction commentary, and the awesome music, really the main thing that interests me in this short is how Barta animated the water in the sink. I know that that's a very small part of his much larger concerns, but it was the only part of the animation that looked really inventive and original. The rest of it looks a lot like what would eventually become commercials for the very things that Barta is criticizing.

--PolarisDiB

circular logic

[lee_eisenberg · 27 September 2011]

Jiří Barta's "Diskžokej" ("Disc Jockey" in English) shows a bunch of actions and processes represented by circles. There's also a bunch of labels that nowadays would look like product placement. The neat scene was when one of the records had an Apple logo (the Beatles' record company, not the then-incipient computer company). I assume that this was all meant to be a mild satire on consumerism, although it's hard to tell with the prominence of the logos.

I liked "A Ballad about Green Wood", "The Club of the Laid Off" and "Projekt/The Design" (for which IMDb strangely has no entry) better. This one is a little too weird to register.