User reviews

I first came to this short film through my affection for Lustmord. After hearing and seeing the less than 4 minute version, my attention was piqued, and searched for more, finding the nearly 19 minute one. I have to agree that the overall feel is beautiful, but yes, there's so much more that could be done with this storyline. There are snippets here and there that hint at industrial revolution, and this experiment is happening within the confines of a noisy, sweaty building that easily masks the cries of the captured. The wealthy men must be the scientist's financial backers, but alas, since all is only speculation, we have nothing with which to reference our observations. This would be an excellent movie, I think, were it more detailed. As it is, not too bad at all!

The knock on music video directors working outside the video arena is that their work tends to be all style and no substance. But what if the style is the substance? What if, for instance, you are adapting a piece of literature whose primary aim was to evoke a mood, to create a sensation? Well, then … being heavy on style is just what is necessary to create a masterpiece. This is the case with Charlie Deaux's Zoetrope, an eighteen minute short film based on Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony. Collaborating with Lustmord's Brian Williams, cinematographer James Hawkinson and animator Robert Beebe, Deaux has created an impeccable, nightmarish vision of a man crushed and destroyed by the mechanistic devices of science, politics and bureaucracy.

As is the case with almost all of Kafka's short fiction – much of his long work, as well – Zoetrope is entirely a mood piece. There is no narrative to speak of. A man, naked, is held in a decaying cell for unspecified reasons and left to go mad as a man in military uniform spouts high sounding philosophy of nothingness while working his elaborate machinery. The machine is everything, the man nothing. It is an oppressive world, dank and soulless, entirely cold and uncaring. Not only does the prisoner not know why he is being held, he never will know and has only a life of isolation and torture to look forward to.

The world of Zoetrope is absolutely impeccable. Deaux works in sharply contrasted black and white and, along with his impressive list of collaborators, has created a sharply detailed world. The film is beautifully shot and edited, the sound design – I hesitate to call it a score – bolsters the mood perfectly, and Beebe's animation fuses flawlessly with the live action elements. The tech elements are built around found elements, a sort of retro-tech that will seem familiar to fans of Chris Marker's La Jetee or Mamoru Oshii's Avalon. Indeed, though Deaux quickly establishes a visual style purely his own fans of David Lynch or Shinya Tsukamoto will find a lot to love here.

Beautiful in its brutality, poetic despite being so unrelentingly grim, Zoetrope is a must see in the world of post-apocalyptic film that marks Deaux as a significant talent, a man who needs to be watched. The DVD – released by dark indie music label Soleilmoon – is sparse and non-anamorphic but it features a pristine transfer and gorgeous packaging. Simply stunning stuff.

He appears to have gotten comparisons with people like Tsukamoto and Lynch for this short, at least from reviewers on here, but the short lacks the more interesting vision of those name dropped incessantly.

The imagery and art direction are pretty good, but a lot of the images are reused, so it often feels very repetitive and poorly paced, or like there's no progression, which might be the point, but it doesn't really help the film much. The CGI is luckily not employed very often, because it often looks very clumsy—revealing the low budget.

The editing doesn't seem particularly thoughtful: in fact it reminds me of an MTV music video (MTV or not, it's very similar to the style of a music video, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were repurposed into one). Lots of fast cuts and multiple layers of imagery with, yet again, lots of repeated images. It's very fast and seems to rotate around all the art direction five times to make sure the audience doesn't miss anything. It doesn't have the frenetic effect offered by Tsukamoto's Tetsuo made a decade earlier—probably because it lacks the context developed as Tetsuo unfolds and it doesn't have a good soundtrack that augments the imagery. It seems to be there to confuse the viewer and perhaps provide a glimpse into a fractured mind, with some recurring imagery to add coherence, but it often feels aimless, and little context is given to understand anything that's going on, so that doesn't help... It may be that I just have a difficult time understanding the narrator. I think it's more of an issue of bad audio mixing in this case. He speaks while loud sound effects and music overpower his voice.

It's basically cheesy steampunk with the guy who wants to be the next Vincent Price trying to narrate one long trailer.