"Apartment" “Apartment” is a laconic in its aphoristic completeness masterpiece of Schwankmeier, in which the director retains such a rare balance between the ambiguity of symbolism and the specificity of the content. Removing the parable about the opposition of the individual to the socialist system, the director creates a kind of requiem of the “Prague Spring”, a bitter postscript to the hopes of the Czechoslovak intelligentsia for “socialism with a human face”.
“Apartment” is a film largely about the “fruits of socialism”, about the aggressiveness of the environment in relation to the “little man”, about his Kafkaesque homelessness in the soulless socialist mechanism. Rhythmic editing drawing merges with a delightful musical design, which allows you to create an almost Heideggerian statement about the abandonment of a person in a hostile objective world, thereby expanding the socio-critical context of the story.
The human personality is rejected by any thing with which it tries to interact: the bed crumbles to the dust, the egg does not break, the clothes stick to the walls, they themselves are plasticine. The external world is trying to forcibly integrate a person, deprive him of his autonomous existence. But this man himself is not a free and self-sufficient person, but as always in Schwankmeier, faithful to the anthropological intentions of non-classical art, is only a suffering, helpless body.
The aggression of ubiquitous power against corporeality, a long-standing theme of poststructuralism, is revealed by Schwankmeier in the context of totalitarianism, as the most obvious expression of the terror of the despotic whole against its parts. Indicating the body where to go, seeking to regulate its behavior even in trifles, brutally encroaching on its private space by coercion to communal publicity, it taboos the sexual existence of the body, robotizing it and turning it into a socially controlled puppet, but signs a verdict for the power of repressed sensory desires sooner or later will take revenge and the consequences of sexual emancipation will be catastrophic, leading to the segmentation of the whole and the autonomy of the being of its parts.
However, in 1968, when the film was created, few people could imagine the scale of the beginning of the sensationalization of public consciousness, although everyone was its living witnesses. It can be safely argued that Schwankmeier made a film about the fatal, inevitable death of the despotic whole of Western culture, which was created over nine hundred years, assumed certain ideological forms, but always retained its Pharisaic, emasculated Christian meanings - soulless, devoid of any compassion for human shortcomings, rigoristic moralism, Puritan spirit, external, not rooted in human conscience, stifling normativeness, rational monologism - all that the counterculture in the 1970s and 1990s apparently buried without return. Totalitarianism of the Soviet and Nazi model is the most cannibal expression of the purism and Pharisaic literary yearning for social and cultural homogeneity that have been characteristic of the West since the eleventh century.
In one episode of The Apartments, we see a man walking through the air with a bird in his hands, giving the hero an axe, which apparently symbolizes the “inspiring” spirit of emancipation in which the cultural revolutionaries of the 1960s believed. Just as a bird can lay an egg, dissident theories contain the potential for social transformation, being a real weapon in the fight against the rigidity of the socialist system. However, having destroyed the first obstacle, the hero discovers a blank wall behind it - the enemy was stronger than expected, the hopes of the "Prague Spring" were crushed by Soviet tanks.
Leaving a signature on the wall, the hero, and with him the director, acknowledge their dissident status and willingness to fight without hope of victory. As time has shown, they were only twenty years away from victory. The despotic whole, in both the socialist and capitalist variants, was destroyed by powerful countercultural opposition on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But this whole has been replaced by a discrete, decentralized pluralism that discriminates against all universality. The consequences of the rematch of the parts against the oppressive tyrannical whole were as terrible as those against which Schwankmeier and his counterculture colleagues fought.