The Ossuary and Other Tales (2006)

When Frank first met Jennifer Whitehead, her panties were around her ankles and her ass was in the air. She had been decaying for 8–9 months in an irrigation ditch along I-376 outside Monroeville, Pennsylvania. Aside from the panties, she was naked, wrapped in several Hefty trash bags. Her personal effects were nearby. Under the circumstances the forensics team had been called in under a homicide investigation. Frank lost a coin toss to a state trooper to open and inventory her rucksack (later at the autopsy he would win the toss to go through her wallet, discovered later, five yards further down the ditch.). However, the crime scene fit much more neatly with Ms. Whitehead’s several suicide attempts. She had been in and out of clinics. She had on two prior occasions stripped naked, and wrapped herself in trash bags in order to suffocate herself, first lubricating the wheels with Jacquin’s rum and Tylenol cold caps. Her pack was found to contain a mostly drained liter of Jacquins’s white and an empty foil sheet of cold medicine. At the time, Frank’s own girlfriend had been in and out of hospitals and had flexed her razor courage more than once. Jennifer Whitehead became Frank’s last case. There is a machinery to the universe, a clanging whimsical mess of linkages and gears. Something of a mad carousel with fevered pipe organ heart. Directors such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch and Jenuet and Caro know this. And Jan Svankmajer is most likely who taught them. A collection of his shorts, entitled The Ossuary and Other Tales became available on September 12, 2006 (Kino Video). Svankmajer has been one of the forefronts of animation, particularly stop-motion and claymation animation, since the 1960s and culminating in his first feature film Neco z Alenky (aka Alice [in Wonderland]) in 1988. He’s also had recent success with Otesánek (Little Otik, 2000) based on the old fairy tale of the cannibal log baby. (What?! Didn’t ya mama ever read you that one?). He’s also put out a lot of “tactile sculptures” over the years, particularly in the 1970s when forbidden to produce films by the Czech government. So why haven’t you heard of Svankmajer? Probably because you don’t find anything clever or relevant unless it’s coming out of Ashton Kutcher, you bastard. But seriously, if interested, you aren’t ready for Alice; it’s too long, dark and weird. The Ossuary DVD however is a reasonably-priced alternative; Frank picked it up fro $19.95 on-line (but, you can even wait a few months for the Korean bootlegs). The Ossuary is a potpourri of Svankmajer’s films ranging from the rapid-fire montage of animal pix entitled Historia Naturae, Suita (1967), to the surreal live action Zahrada (The Garden, 1968) to the impressive self-made clay man of Tma/Svetlo/Tma (Darkness/Light/Darkness;1989). And by the by, the Ossuary in question is Sedlec Ossuary, in the Czech Republic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary, for those of you in wiki-ality). Home of over 50,000 plague victims more or else glued together as church statuary. It is definitely the next place on Graveyard Frank’s vacation hot spots. The best part is that, like a true artist Svankmajer isn’t hitting you over the head all the time (except when he wants to.). This is fascinating, intricate stuff. Watch it with your eyes wide open! And speaking of eyes wide open…

The second time Frank met Jennifer Whitehead was on the sixth floor landing of his small Baltimore walkup. He was scuttling up with a liter of Jacquin’s, tucking in for a chilly autumn night in the Inner Harbor. He recognized her instantly from her DL photo. It was imprinted on his memory. She had kept her married name, not Whitehead. Frank had surmised much about this small fact over the years. Behind her license, she also kept two guitar picks and an emergency 50 cents for the phone. Not that she had tried to call anyone when things gotten so bad that sad day last century. She was beautiful, though she had failed to realize this in death as she had in life. She said only “I’m sorry.” And then had vanished as quickly as she had come. “I understand,” Frank sighed, and fumbled with his keys. “I’m sorry, too.” [Jacquin’s is only palatable with some hot cider and a dash of vanilla...] And when he pulled the bottle out of the paper bag, he found the paper label had be sufficiently but neatly inscribed “Jennifer Whitehead 10-31-94.”