Blood Tea and Red String (2006) [w/Commentary]

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Blood Tea and Red String (2006) [w/Commentary]

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It's hard to describe the delirium of watching this movie, you get to see three albino mice in Elizabethan costumes playing gin rummy with blank cards whilst sipping blood tea. The clanking of porcelain cups and ticking of the clock makes for a frenzied enough soundtrack to push this reviewer over the edge all by itself. There is also a spider in this movie with the head of a Mrs Danvers who calmly mummifies the hummingbirds she catches in her web with red string. Another of the menagerie is a crow with a skeleton head. This is theatre of the macabre par excellence, and certainly would not suit all viewers.

There is a sense of messianism and deep longing in the white mice towards the doll of their affection which I found actually quite touching. This sense of the mystic is not to be found in similar stop motion features like Jan Svankmajer's Alice. I sometimes wonder if we, like the mice in the movie are simply child-like in our existence, fumbling for meaning, victims of an experience that we cannot possibly understand in the round.

The sense of composition in this work is so exquisite. Of course with a film that is almost a solo effort by Cegavske, and which took over a decade to complete, one would not expect anything else. But the devotion does shine through. You could take so many frames from this movie and hang them on the wall.

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Blood Tea and Red String (2006) [w/Commentary]

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