Disc Jockey (1980)
An alarm clock wakes a man who washes his face, has breakfast, drives his car to work, spins records, returns home, and takes his pills. It's a world of circles - often seen from above: an espresso cup, a stairwell, the pills, and the records spinning. At the dance where the music plays, the rhythms evoke images of a butcher slicing head cheese, gears driving other wheels and levers, a combine churning out bales of hay, a butcher cutting chunks of meat for a stew, and boxers punching. The circle of music and life.
Watch Trailer
Cast
Similar titles
Reviews
Jiří Barta's "Diskokej" ("Disc Jockey" in English) shows a bunch of actions and processes represented by circles. There's also a bunch of labels that nowadays would look like product placement. The neat scene was when one of the records had an Apple logo (the Beatles' record company, not the then-incipient computer company). I assume that this was all meant to be a mild satire on consumerism, although it's hard to tell with the prominence of the logos.I liked "A Ballad about Green Wood", "The Club of the Laid Off" and "Projekt/The Design" (for which IMDb strangely has no entry) better. This one is a little too weird to register.
Take this one with "The Club of the Laid Off", and one can see that Barta had a lot of disturbed fascination with consumerism and the turn Czechoslavakia took in the late 70s/early 80s.The animation wins here. Barta makes a sort of mini-narrative out of what are for the most part primary shapes, circles, triangles, and squares. These shapes serve as dials, advertisements, buildings, meters, food, and of course discs. From a displaced first-person perspective the world is animated through the disc-jockey's eyes.However, even with the stripped-down animation, the drug-addiction commentary, and the awesome music, really the main thing that interests me in this short is how Barta animated the water in the sink. I know that that's a very small part of his much larger concerns, but it was the only part of the animation that looked really inventive and original. The rest of it looks a lot like what would eventually become commercials for the very things that Barta is criticizing.--PolarisDiB