One of Svankmajer's lesser known or regarded shorts (and one of his few 2D animated ones), I like Et Cetera, and it very nearly earns an extra half star from me.

This is one of his earliest shorts, made in 1966 when he was still basically a symbolist, and before he tipped over into being a full-blown surrealist a year or two later. Consequently it's arguably a bit easier to follow. A symbol has to stand for something, after all. Surrealism is virtually required to be impenetrable in any universal sense. In fact this short's title 'Et Cetera' could just about be a symbol for the themes of nearly all Svankmajer's earlier work.

**Spoilers follow**

The short consists of three segments.

In the first, a man builds himself a pair of wings with which he flies from one chair to another - then a series of successively larger wings, which which he flies further and further, ending up broken, back where he started. In part two a human fugure (who seems to be less of a collage than cut-out whose movements reveal old and medieval paintings) trains an animal to perform more elaborate tricks. With each new trick the man becomes more animalistic and the animal becomes more human, until the animal is training the human. Finally we have a human stuck in the repeating dillema of drawing a house which he can't get inside of, and drawing a house which he can't escape from.

The themes aren't too hard to discern: the futility of progress, evolution and human endeavour in the face an implacable universe (in the end the projector melts through the film, as if the characters have run out of time to do something important).

The ideas are less dark than 'Picnic with Weissmann' or 'The Flat', but they're not so different. An underrated Svankmajer short.