Svankmajer's first monochrome film, "The Flat" is about this late 1960's Czech everyman who has been literally flung into this dingy, primitive apartment. There he quickly discovers that reality does not work as it should; the man attempts to light a wood-fired stove, but water comes out, dousing the match; for no reason, the bare lightbulb begins swinging and lengthening it's cord, so it can bash a small hole in a brick wall, whereupon the light retracts into the ceiling. In the middle of the room there is a table with a meal (a boiled egg in a holder, soup, a tankard of beer, and a plateful of things that look like linked sausages.) The man sits down to eat, only to have the beer become a tiny doll's stein when he drinks it, then reverting to the (now-empty) tankard when he puts it down. He can't drink the soup, because suddenly the spoon has holes. He tries to break the egg, only to have it break the holder and fall through the table onto his foot, a painful experiance. The "sausages" are also inedible; they bend the fork prongs. The man then attempts to sleep in a bed, but it disintigrates into a large pile of sawdust. In the end, a man walks into the room in slow motion, holding a chicken and an axe. The protagonist takes the axe as the man glides back out through a second door. The door has no handle, so the everyman hacks it to pieces, only to find that it covers a wall. The wall is covered with names; the man adds his with a pencil.
I went to the trouble of recounting most of the film to make a point, that this is an allegory of the secret police interrogations that went on after the Soviets reinvaded Czechoslovakia during the "Prague Spring" of 1968. In such an interrogation, the subject would be more and more disoriented by placing the person in a cell with no windows where the light (from a bare bulb) was eternally on, along with nonsensical questioning, irregular meal times, and bizarre arbitrary behavior by guards and interrogators. At the end of whatever time it took to break the prisoner, he/she would be forced to sign a confession, either written by the prisoner or concocted by the secret police. I suspect that the only reason that "Byt" survived was due to the literal-mindedness of Czech censors and the secret police.
I went to the trouble of recounting most of the film to make a point, that this is an allegory of the secret police interrogations that went on after the Soviets reinvaded Czechoslovakia during the "Prague Spring" of 1968. In such an interrogation, the subject would be more and more disoriented by placing the person in a cell with no windows where the light (from a bare bulb) was eternally on, along with nonsensical questioning, irregular meal times, and bizarre arbitrary behavior by guards and interrogators. At the end of whatever time it took to break the prisoner, he/she would be forced to sign a confession, either written by the prisoner or concocted by the secret police. I suspect that the only reason that "Byt" survived was due to the literal-mindedness of Czech censors and the secret police.