The Ossuary (1970) by Jan Švankmajer
« One of the neglected masterpieces produced during Švankmajer’s early career is Kostnice (The Ossuary, 1970), a « horror documentary » shot in one of his country’s most unique and bleakest monuments, the Sedlec Monastery Ossuary. The Sedlec Ossuary contains the bones of some 50 to 70 thousand people buried there since the Middle Ages. Over a period of a decade, they were fashioned by the Czech artist František Rint with his wife and two children into fascinating displays of shapes and objects, including skull pyramids, crosses, a monstrance and a chandelier containing every bone of the human body. Their work was completed in 1870, and these artifacts have been placed in the crypt of the Cistercian chapel as a memento mori for the contemplation of visitors. »
***
Les images qui suivent proviennent du blog « Death Takes a Holiday« , trouvées (encore) sur le Morbid Anatomy (tout comme le vidéo de Jan Švankmajer … Ici le vidéo, là les photos) …
The blog is ‘committed–or so it seems–to visiting and documenting the finest necropoli, “osteo-architecture, » and concentrations of mummies and religious waxworks in the entire world, including sites in Ecuador, Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Newark, New Jersey’…
