Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

I saw earlier today a 35 mm print of Czech animation wizard Karel Zeman's Baron Prásil, also known with the title of the subject line. In Finnish, it's been called Parooni Münchhausenin uskomattomat seikkailut. I don't know what's with the Baron Prásil thing, but that's not very important here.

I wrote earlier (three years ago!) about Zeman's other film (see here) and said that his films resemble the silent cinema. It's like we're seeing everything for the first time. It's a cinema of marvels and rare beauty. It's also the cinema of laughter and joy. And it fits Zeman made his film about Münchhausen whose adventures have brought us laughter and joy for many decades.

Zeman's technique - the mixing of live actors with animated backgrounds - works very well here. Everything is very exotic and strange and beautiful. This is also cinema of optimism, even though there's a healthy strand of satire as well.

Zeman's film is also an important precursor to steampunk, mixing modern heroes and inventions with steamboats, air balloons, flying horses and such. It's no wonder Terry Gilliam was impressed by the film.

This is a trailer someone made to commemmorate Zeman's film. More Overlooked Films here.

Help needed identifying cartoon characters

I just bought a miserable old VHS cassette with five short animated cartoons. All the five films in the bunch were without opening titles, and I could recognize only one of the cartoons (a Filmation Popeye), some others were probably Terrytoons. I'll have to check into them later, but here's a photo I took of the first one. Does anyone recognize the characters in the picture? There's also a third cat, who's a kid brother or a nephew of the two in the picture. The cats spoke English under the lousy Finnish dubbing. I'm thinking this might be something Gene Deitch cooked up with Yugoslavian animators in the mid-to-late sixties.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Hooked Bear (1956)

Suffering from a bad back I watched some VHS tapes with old animations in them and spotted this Disney cartoon previously unknown to me. I don't know how this has happened - the explanation is perhaps that I've seen some of the Humphrey the Bear cartoons, but forgotten all about them. Nonetheless, this was a pretty entertaining little film, directed by Jack Hannah.

 More Overlooked Films here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Lord of the Rings by Ralph Bakshi (1978)

I watched Ralph Bakshi's early animated version of Tolkien's saga with my son, who's on a Tolkien binge, having watched Peter Jackson's film twice (or even thrice!). I could see he wasn't thrilled, but he managed through. Maybe he was interested in the differences between the versions.

I'm not sure whether I was, since I found Bakshi's film boring, clumsy and pretentious. I'd seen it before (on big screen), but the film proved to be duller than I remembered. I don't really know what one gets out of it, if one hasn't read Tolkien's book (or seen Jackson's version!), since Bakshi's film is lacking in good, solid narration. I don't know whether anyone seeing the film will care much for the faith of the Ring or the characters.

I promised my son I would try to seek the unofficial Bass-Rankin sequel to Bakshi's film, but Lord help from finding it!

More Overlooked Movies here at Todd Mason's blog.

More old animations

I watched the whole VHS cassette I mentioned earlier having the fifties' Disney animated short Susie, the Blue Little Coupe. Found out there were many interesting cartoons I had no prior knowledge of and some that were not very easily available in other formats when the cassette was published (which, by the way, took place in 1999, though I'd thought it would've been an older publication - perhaps it was a republication of an older one).

Billy Mouse's Akwakade, seemingly redistributed in the late sixties on television under another title (which I already forgot), a parody of an Esther Williams swimming film:

Parrotville Post Office, a 1935 cartoon by Burt Gillett made for Van Beuren Studios:



Dave Fleischer's Little Lambkin from 1940:



A Waif's Welcome, another Van Beuren animation directed by Burt Gillett:



Strolling Through the Park from 1949 made for Famous Studios. Sorry, no YouTube link for this. Quite stylishy animated, and there's also a sort of karaoke part for everyone to join the singing.

And finally Spirit of '43, a war-time Disney propaganda film, which I thought were not very well available in the nineties. Now they are of course available on DVD.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Susie, the Little Blue Coupe

Finland also had its share of cheap VHS cassettes loaded with old animated cartoons that had fallen out of copyright, mainly from the small studios, like Van Beuren, and stuff from the thirties and early fourties. I've been buying them cheap from thrift stores and other places for some time now - not all of them are available on DVD, and as you are well aware, I'm interested in the history of animation (I even have an unsold manuscript on the subject).

But this I'd never seen - I didn't even actually know it existed. And I sure didn't know there were Disney films that have fallen out of copyright. The video cassette looked awful with a very bad recreation of the Little Blue Coupe on the cover, but since I pack a cell phone with a net access all the time, I was able to Google the film to know it was worth the 20 cents. Well, I might've bought it nevertheless.

This small film was directed by Clyde Geronimi, who later on directed lots of Disney feature-length classics, like Cinderella and Peter Pan (to be exact on this, he was one of the directors on those movies).

The cassette holds some half dozen other animated cartoons from the thirties and early fourties, but this was clearly the gem of the bunch. I'll probably write something more about the other movies later.

Move overlooked movies at Todd Mason's blog. 

Animated version of John Carter of Mars

Warner animator Bob Clampett and John Coleman Burroughs, Edgar Rice Burroughs's son, tried to develop a weekly animated series based on ERB's Mars novels. Nothing came of it, except for these short sequences, commented by Clampett himself.

Tuesday's (or actually Wednesday's) Overlooked Film: The Humpbacked Horse (1975)

As you're probably aware by now, I'm interested in old animated cartoons and animations in general. I've always been interested in them, but I'm now trying to start a new book project: a book on the history of the animated films. There's only one book on the subject in Finnish and it's been sold out for ages now, as it was published in 1978 (IIRC). As for its contents, it's pretty lightweight, though entertaining.

Developing the project in my mind, I've been watching lots of obscure cartoons, some with my kids. Some of the older Japanese anime films have been largely forgettable, but the Russian cartoons seem to be very good, especially the longer ones. Mihail Tshehanevsky's The Wild Swans (1966) from the H. C. Andersen tale was very stylish and beautiful, alwas retaining its almost art deco artfulness. Ivan Ivanov-Vano's The Humpbacked Horse from a Russian poem that I watched more recently was however more in the vein of a traditional fairytale, though very well drawn.

Ivanov-Vano was one of the foremost Soviet animators, starting out with short subjects in the thirties, and filming The Humpbacked Horse already in 1947 (this previous film was shown in Finnish cinema at the time!) and remaking it in 1977. My dad had the later film on VHS and I loaned it. The quality was already pretty poor, but the film, minus the dreadful dubbing (just one person doing all the lines, with the original Russian lines audible in the back!), was very good, exotic and very well drawn (especially the backgrounds). The storyline featured interesting locals, magic and adventure.

Kauto also got a glimpse from the film and much to my surprise stayed with it until the end. And then yesterday he asked if he could see it again! But alas, the VHS had deteriorated, just in two or three days after my first viewing, and you could see practically nothing. I'll have to haunt this down either on DVD or on a better-quality VHS.

Here's some info on the film, and here's Wikipedia on Ivanov-Vano. More Overlooked Films here.

And here's an interesting item, a satire movie by Ivanov-Vano from the story by poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, made already in the 1930's.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Adventures of the American Rabbit

I'm sure this means huge nostalgia to many Americans, but I hadn't even heard of the film when I ran into it at a thriftstore on an old VHS cassette. The Adventures of the American Rabbit is an indie-produced, but mainly Japanese-made American animated film. I'm sure there's a financial analysis somewhere in this, but I can't make it. (The film's title in Finnish is Jenkkijänis, by the way, which is an almost literal translation. It was never shown in theaters here.)

I've been carrying obscure animated films home on VHS for some years now, many of them remain unwatched, some I take a glimpse at by myself, but I managed to make my kids to watch this with me. Maybe they thought it was cute to have a rabbit as a superhero, but eventually they pretty much wore out. The film is dated, the animation is not very imaginative and the story lacks pace and coherence (just who is the old guy saying that the rabbit in the lead must become a superhero?). I was also a bit suspicious of the film's concept: a rabbit changing into an American superhero and fighting the baddies... but luckily the idea of being American in the film is having fun and hanging out with your friends in a bar listening to the music. One might want to take a closer look at the film's politics, though, but I wasn't in the mood and didn't really pay attention to the film all the time myself. One point, though: the name of the band in the film is The White Brothers, which seems to say the blacks are not welcome.

I thought this was only a mildly interesting curiosity, but then again I hadn't seen it as a kid. When I posted about this in Facebook, I got many responses from people younger than me that this was a favourite in the eighties in Finland as well. That goes on to show that one doesn't know everything.

Here's IMDb on the film. And here's more Overlooked Films. Edit: after checking out some links and Googling for more, I found that the famous internet person Christian Weston Chandler has talked about this film and has used it as inspiration for his - seemingly notoriously bad - own comics. Hadn't heard of Christian Weston Chandler before!

Here's the opening credit sequence:



PS. I made better with watching Budd Boetticher's 7 Men from Now: taut and very short, expertly paced Western thriller, with Randolph Scott and Lee Marvin. Burt Kennedy's excellent script with an excellent twist or two in the middle. Highly, highly recommended, though I'm sure all the people reading this blog have seen it. You should, if you haven't!

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Fabulous World of Jules Verne

I lured Kauto, my 6-year old son, to watch an ancient black & white Czech animation from an ancient VHS. To my surprise, Kauto watched the whole movie with me! It was Karel Zeman's Vynález zkázy from 1958, known in Finland as Salaisuuksien saari (The Island of Secrets) and in the English-speaking world as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (or Invention for Destruction). It's the film version of one of Jules Verne's lesser-known novels, Face au drapeau AKA Facing the Flag (in Finland as Isänmaan lippu). Zeman is best known for his animation collage in which he uses live actors mixed with stop-motion animation and the original illustrations for Jules Verne's novels. It's very beautiful, as if the fictional world of Verne comes out alive on screen. As an adventure, The Fabulous World of Jules Verne is slow-moving, but it also contains lots of beauty. It's the beauty of a silent cinema, of something happening for the first time and the thrilling sensation we get out of it. Zeman is one of the great artists of cinema.

Here are the opening credits. Seems like you can watch the whole film on YouTube. (More overlooked films at Todd Mason's blog here.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Dreams That Money Can Buy

I've had this film on DVD for years on loan from a friend of mine, but I had some time to watch only now. I'd read about the film quite a lot and I'd been interested in it for a long time, but the film proved to be somewhat disappointing.

This is spelled out in the excellent brochure that comes with the British Film Institute DVD: the film is "neither intellectual enough for an art film, nor entertaining enough to be popular". But the story behind the film is more interesting than what we see on screen. Dreams That Money Can Buy was supervised by Hans Richter, German avantgarde filmmaker whose abstract animations are part of the canon of the experimental cinema. The film was made in the US as an indie production and the point was to make an experimental film that could be played in more conventional forums, not only in art galleries and places like that. Richter got other European Surrealists and other artists to go along in the project - the list is breath-taking: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Fernard Léger, Alexander Calder and Max Ernst. This is not only abstract animation, the episodes are made all in different styles and techiques. (I won't provide links to all the artists, I'm sure you know who they are. At least you should!)

The problems are visible almost the minute the film starts: the actors are clumsy, the voice-over narration (used also in dialogue) is clumsy. Not all of the episodes are interesting either. I recognized Max Ernst himself in his own episode, "Desire", that followed the Surrealist dogma of resembling a dream, but his episode left me cold. This was a far cry from any Luis Buñuel film. (Buñuel always did things in a very realist way, shooting at eye-sight and not using weird editing techniques - this keeps even his most Surrealist films very watchable.) Fernand Léger's episode, "The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart", was a love story told with shop-window dummies - must've been a fresh idea at the time, but it's been done so many times since that Léger's film seemed dated. The song to go with it, sung by Libby Holman and Josh White, was quite funny, with its Surrealist lyrics, but all too long.

Man Ray's spoofy and jokey "Ruth, Roses and Revolvers" was about the film media making people act against their own will, but again, not very interesting. Marcel Duchamp's "Discs" was one of weirdest episodes, but also one of the best: it has different discs rotating, facing the viewer, and shots of a nude descending the stairs (Duchamp's best-known Cubist painting). The film also refers to Duchamp's earlier film, Anemic Cinema. The music was by John Cage (more on that later). Alexander Calder, famous for his beautiful mobiles, had two episodes. The first one was just about his mobiles moving around, and it was not even very well photographed. The other episode, "Circus", was done with some of his moving toy-like figures. Charming, but not very interesting as a movie - not enough story.

The film ends with Hans Richter's film noir parody, "Narcissus". A guy notices his face turns blue during a poker game. A nightmare starts, he runs away from other people and other things, everything seems scary. This episode also suffers from stilted acting and voice-over, but it's still one of the most interesting things in the film. David Lynch is said to like the film and it's easy to see that he's taken things especially out of Richter's episode.

As for the music in Dreams, it's done by modernist composers, like Darius Milhaud and Louis Applebaum. Their music has suffered in the hands of time, though: it just doesn't like modern anymore. John Cage is an exception here, his short composition for Duchamp's hypnotic film supports the images and sounds fresh even today. Interesting to note, though, that Paul Bowles, the writer of The Sheltering Sky, wrote the compositions for two films, Ernst's and Calder's.

The BFI disc has also three short films by Hans Richter, from the 1920's. They are interesting, but suffer from the lack of music on the soundtrack. There's a hypnotic quality to these, though. The middle one, Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928), shows the love the Surrealists had for the crime and adventure fiction, and the last one, Everyday (1929), has some contribution from Sergei Eisenstein - there are some shots in the film that might be outtakes from an Eisenstein film.

Here's the link to other contributions to the Tuesday meme.

Here's Duchamp's and Cage's "Discs" from the film:

The history of French animation

I was at the Tampere Short Film Festival last weekend, the festival I've attended to for the last 20 years, with some (one or two) one-year pauses. This year I was particularly interested in the three-show series consisting of old French animated films, ranging from Émile Reynaud's cartoons from the 1870's to films made just after WWII. There were many films I hadn't previously seen, even though some of the films were familiar to me.

The earliest examples were pretty crude, as you can imagine, but there's also a sense of invention and real magic, especially in the two films by Émile Cohl, his first, Phantasmagorie, from 1908, and a later one, called Les Locataires d´à côté from 1909. The latter one is a good example of early Surrealism that still flourished in commercial cinema during that time.

The second screening of the series was the best. There were the best-known examples of French art animation, like Berthold Bartosch's Expressionistic L'Idée (1932) and Alexandre Alexeïeff's Night on a Bald Mountain (1933). The most striking example - and one I had never seen - was La Joie de vivre (1937) by two British artists, Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin. It's timeless, could've been made in the sixties or seventies - or even now, with some alterations. It's made in a free-flowing, fluent and fast style, with only outline drawings. I can find only one link with an extract from the film, and the quality is poor, but it's here nevertheless.

The third screening consisted of films made in the fourties, during the war and just after it. The most interesting of these was Jean Painlevé's clay animation, Bluebeard. It was a wild experience, utterly unrealistic, in weird colours, with crude and grotesque humour reminiscent of Rabelais and his Gargantua and Pantagruel, with heads being chopped and all. Painlevé has seen a renaissance in later years, with a DVD collection of his short films having been released; he was a Surrealist, but also a scientist, who used his fellow Surrealists' ideas in his scientific films, the best-known of which is probably Le Vampire from 1945, a horror documentary about a blood-sucking bat.

Also Paul Grimault's two films in the screening were very good, reminding one of the best American cartoons of the era, with only more artistic ideas thrown in - for example L'épouvantail/The Scarecrow from 1943 in which the devoid landscape is an echo from Surrealist paintings.

One of the most interesting and most boring films in the screening was André-Édouard Marty's Callisto from 1943. The ancient tale of Greek antiquity was told in art deco style, with a very slow pace, in artistically high standard, but also with boring rigidity. It was said that Marty made this in order to show how the French should be making animations in the new Europe (we have to remember that the Nazis were on the winning side in 1942 and 1943 when this was made). I made a quick association to Finland and thought that this is how Finnish animators could've worked had there been any animation industry in the country in the 1940's. (I had especially sculpturer Wäinö Aaltonen in mind - he never made any cartoons, that's for sure, but I think the Founding Fathers of Finland might've called for him, if there had been a need.)

Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie:



Grimault's L'épouvantail:

Hurrah for the Fleischers!

We've been watching quite a lot of old Superman cartoons by Max and Dave Fleischer with Kauto. I bought an old VHS cassette some time ago and Kauto was enthusiastic from the word go. He said to me today he's gonna be a film maker when he grows up, and later he said he'll make a movie in which he shows how Superman is born and how the planet Krypton blows up. Didn't know we have Richard Donner living with us.

(Kauto also said that he'll make the world's longest movie that shows someone sleeping for 24 hours... We've been talking about the longest movies and I told him there's a film called Sleep. Kauto also said that it may be even 100 hours long. "No one sleeps that long", I said. "He's not a real man, he's fabricated!")

Those Fleischer Supermans (Supermen?) are fascinating. They are pretty well-made in their own right, but it's interesting to note how noirish they are in their design, with steep camera angles and very shadowy lighting, the use of silhouettes and such. It's at times like watching Citizen Kane.

Here's one that's not on the VHS I bought. I seem to remember my kid brother used to watch these, too, and this was one of his favourites.

Cthulhu for children

Here's a very cute animation, Lil' Cthulhu. Suitable for even four years old! (I didn't try this on my kids, though - no Finnish subtitles.)

You just gotta love him! (Or "her"? Or "it"?)

Flemish 3D western

The most popular Flemish cartoon series ever, Suske en Wiske (Anu ja Antti in Finnish), has been made into a 3D animated film and it's a western! The characters look ugly, as they seem to always do in computer animation, but interesting nevertheless.

Colin Slater could be our new hero

Some of you may remember that some months ago I posted about a British guy who's been charged with plagiarizing one of Mika Waltari's novels in his vanity press novel the title of which I forget already. Nevertheless, here's the original piece. What's interesting is that someone had posted a comment with a link to a YouTube clip of one of Colin Slater's TV works. He really is someone to follow.

Some obscure and more obscure animated cartoons

I've been watching some pretty forgotten or unknown animated cartoons lately. I don't really know why I like to waste my time on these kind of things, but hey, what else would I write about on this blog? Um.. was this blog supposed to be about pulp fiction? Or my writer's life? Nah, screw that.

And some of these I even enjoy.

The best of the bunch was undoubtedly a DVD collection of Gene Deitch's animations. Deitch is an oddity in the American animation business, since he skipped the US after having worked for Terrytoons in the late fifties and early sixties, and moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia to produce his films with the Eastern bloc animators and artists. Some of the stuff he produced with artists like Zlatko Grgic is interesting, surrealist take on the American animation's most familiar stuff, like a bigger animal chasing a smaller animal and never succeeding. Deitch has a big, black bird chasing a worm. The bird runs on its feet, it doesn't seem to fly (well, it uses some sort of a helicopter in one scene). There are some really surreal moments in these animations, while at the same time they are easily watchable like the Roadrunners or Tom & Jerry.

Deitch also made his own Nudnik cartoons - it's said that the character is based on his own creation for Terrytoons, called Floofle. These were also made in Prague in 1960-1964, and released through Paramount as theatrical shorts. Nudnik (Oiva Tumpeloinen in Finnish) is a small, human-like character who doesn't succeed in anything. He seems like a homeless person - occasionally he lives in buildings to be demolished. There's a feel of silent comedy in these shorts, and one easily thinks of Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton watching Nudnik. I liked these a lot, but Kauto got bored. Ottilia liked Nudnik to a certain extent. I had to watch these all by myself...

I don't think these have ever been shown in Finland - the DVD collection (Oiva Tumpeloisen seikkailuja 1-2) must've been the first instance, even though some of the Czech stuff Deitch produced was shown on telly when I was a kid. If anyone knows more, I'd really like to know.

Now, to a bore called David & Sandy. The film was made in Hungary, which is why I bought the old VHS cassette from a thrift store - I thought it might be one of those artsy Eastern bloc animations I have a great liking for. But no. No no no. It seems that this was an independent production - in Hungary in the late eighties that may have been possible - and that this was intended for international distribution. The film has a feel of American animation, but the art is worse and the characters are very unappealing, especially the kid, David, in the lead, with his bulging eyes and small nose. (And the humans have only four fingers - I find this almost repulsive, even though with ducks or mice it's perfectly okay.) The plot is stupid, with lots of stuff thrown randomly in, from space aliens to a toy museum of the future. Kauto seemed to be interested in the movie, but I solemnly swear I'll never watch it again. (The terrible Finnish dubbing may have something to do with my dislike of the film, but the art was still awful and the plot clichéd and stupid.)

Last but not least, Vuk or The Little Fox by Pannonian Studio, also Hungarian, seemed a lot better, with nice animal characters, but the Finnish dubbing of the ancient VHS cassette was so bad that it seems unprobable I'll watch this to the end. It's been said that this has been the second biggest box-office hit ever in Hungary. No wonder - the little fox, Vuk, is cute. If I have the time to sit through this, I'll report back.

Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

I saw Ralph Bakshi's animated feature Wizards from 1977 couple of weeks ago, but haven't had time to write about it. It was more interesting than good, and most of the time it was pretty boring.

It wasn't bad - the animation was good throughout and there were some striking scenes in which the animators brought together wholly different styles. My main concern was that there was too much of that interplay with different styles - it seemed that Bakshi never really knew what he was doing. He never quite manages to bring his characters alive and they are too different from each other. You never believe they are characters in a fantasy story, reminiscent of Lord of the Rings or some such. And they are too much in the vein of Terrytoons of Bakshi's early career. The same thing with the gags in the film - they are never good enough, only getting somewhere close. The idea of wizards of the future using Nazi propaganda films may have been a good idea to begin with, but it gets pretty abrasive in the end.

It's been said that this is closer Lord of the Rings than Bakshi's dreadful attempt to animate it in 1979. Well, maybe - nevertheless, Bakshi used some of the footage of Wizards in his LoTR. The latter film suffered from financial troubles and Bakshi's visions never come truly alive, but even in here, his better-liked film, he has to resort to voice-over and stills. (Some of the stills must've gained the attention of the Winis and influenced the outlook of their Elfquest graphic novels.)

One thing I really liked in the film were some of the drawings by one Ian Miller who did similar drawings for A Tolkien Bestiary which David Day edited in 1979. He must've gotten the job via Wizards.

More films seen: The Catamount Killing, Rock & Rule, Mars

Last Monday the Finnish Film Archive treated us with two rare films: the Canadian Rock & Rule from 1983 and Mars, a Soviet documentary by Pavel Klushantsev, from 1968. Mars was very beautiful and the scenes on the fictional Mars were breath-taking. It's evident Kubrick learned a lot from Klushantsev. The print was very pretty, with beautifully faded colours, and the Finnish voice-over narration held some poetic descriptions, such as "jos tuhka keväällä vihannoisi".

Rock & Rule, however, was something entirely different. It's an animated film, about 80 minutes long. The tale is set in a distant future after the nuclear war. Rodents seem to have evolved into humanlike creatures and they play rock'n'roll. The soundtrack has some great tracks by Cheap Trick (a band that I've otherwise never really got into) and some not so great by Lou Reed ("My name is Mok") and Debbie Harry. Have these ever been released? I couldn't make out if there's ever been a soundtrack release. The original synthesizer music in the film is horrible.

The animation in the film is actually very good and boasts many different and striking styles. I seem to remember reading that the making of the film took three years to complete. Now it would take three months, with all the computers and shit.

But the storyline in Rock & Rule is not enough - the premise is funny, though: Mok, a super rocker (who's sold "plutonium"), seeks to find a way to bring a demon into one of his concerts. What would Ozzy Osbourne think of this? The story line is a bit thin and there are not enough funny gags. Furthermore, the acoustics in the film are pretty noisy. All the characters are shouting in stupid voices all the time and then there's the synthesizer whining. It's as if the makers didn't believe in their own dialogue. Well, it's evident in many of the recent animated features that there's just gotta be speed and noise all the time.

Lots of people walked out during the film, but I didn't think it was really all that bad. There's a whole web site devoted to the film.

I also managed to see through The Catamount Killing from 1974. It's the most pulp-related film of the three, as it's based on a novel by James Hadley Chase, one of the most important hardboiled writers of Britain. The film is a bastard, to put it nicely: it's situated in America, it's based on a British novel, it's financed by German money and directed by a Polish director, namely Krzysztof Zanussi, who's better known as an art-house director (and one or two of his films that I've seen have been pretty powerful). Also the lead actor is the German Horst Buccholz. He's quite hysterical throughout the movie.

There are some nice touches here and there (especially the climax at the end with Buccholz rushing out of a house with camera following), but overall the film is too slow and you never quite believe how a neurotic jerk like Buchholz could be a bank manager. The music by Wojciech Kilar is very good, eerie and atmospheric.