Even by Svankmajer's standards, this is a weird one. I've read JS interviewed, and he has insisted that he considers objects to be 'more alive' than people, and has gone on about it at enough length that I think he means it.

So, like the other short he produced in Austria, 'A Game With Stones', this film has no live actors in it at all. Unless you count 'Weissmann', who is an empty, animated shirt and pants lying on a bed.

Whereas some slightly earlier Svankmejer films like 'A Game With Stones' or 'Et Cetera' are a bit easier to make sense of, this one came out after he sold his soul to surrealism, so you can't really use straight symbolic comparisons, you can only guess, or describe what associations it triggers in yourself.

One thing worth noting is that this film was made very shortly after 'The Flat', and one critic has even suggested that Weissmann was the former occupant of The Flat, who has 'escaped'. Maybe. I'm not convinced.

One thing this film does have in common with 'The Flat' (and most of JS's other films) is that the human character (if we can assume the empty clothes to be a quasi-human) is basically passive and powerless, whilst objects and natural cycles dictate proceedings. In this film the pivotal object, as we sense early, is the shovel digging around the wardrobe. But what does the increasingly frantic chess game represent - life? What about the gramaphone with the records which change themselves?

Frankly this is a damn weird film, but like most of Svankmajer's films from the 60's, presents a sense of meaninglessness in the human condition. Others of his films would be more up front and articulate with that theme.

This didn't do a hell of a lot for me the first time around, but it has really grown on me, to the point I'd say it was one of Svankmajer's little known gems.