The Golem

Czech Republic

1996

6 Min

Color

Silent

Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
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SCR Gustav Meyrink, Jiří Barta, Edgar Dutka

Combining clay and live action, Jiri Barta’s The Golem launches from the unorthodox version of the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink. His tale is set in a 19th century story, also in the original Jewish Ghetto of Prague, about an anonymous narrator who experiences events from the life of a gem cutter who lived in the ghetto thirty years before. We are left unsure if these experiences with ghosts are hallucinations or metaphysical historical experiences. This Golem is not the original adaptation of the clay monster, but a manifestation of the suffering and misery of the ghetto inhabitant’s collective psyche. Jiri Barta is a critically acclaimed animation director since the early 1980′s, and The Golem is a trailer for a feature work which has not yet been realized. —GIRAF

Director

Jiří Barta

Jiří Barta is a Czech stop-motion animation director. His films, many of which used the medium of wood for animation, garnered critical acclaim and won many awards, but after the fall of the communist government in Czechoslovakia he was unable to release anything for about 15 years (a situation similar to that faced by Russian animator Yuriy Norshteyn). Throughout the 1990s he tried to find funding for a feature film called The Golem, but ultimately only managed to complete a short pilot in 1996 (which can be viewed online). In 2006 he released his first computer-animated short film, and on March 5, 2009 he released a new puppet-animated feature film which was geared more towards a children’s audience. —wikipedia