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7.4/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 7.4/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Bazar remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you get excited about animation history or Russian avant-garde experiments, you’ll probably find this fascinating. If you need a plot that goes from A to B, or even a film that lasts longer than a commercial break, you’re going to be bored to tears. It’s a curiosity, nothing more.
It feels like finding a single, slightly burnt page from a book you were never meant to read. You get a glimpse of the color palette—this harsh, striking aesthetic that feels like it’s screaming at you—and then it just stops.
The animation here is… aggressive. It doesn’t try to be cute or smooth. It’s got that jittery, sharp energy that reminds me a bit of the frantic pacing in Eva and the Grasshopper, but with way more grit. Everything feels like it was drawn by someone who was running out of time.
Watching this, you can almost sense the weight of the project that didn't make it. It’s like a piece of The Pickaninny if it had been put through a meat grinder and reassembled by people obsessed with opera. The movement is weirdly stilted, like a puppet show where the strings are occasionally being pulled by a maniac.
It makes me think about how much stuff is just gone. We act like cinema is permanent, but then you see something like this and realize it’s mostly just dust. It’s not even a full scene. It’s a fragment of a fragment.
There’s a specific frame where the Priest looks almost terrified, or maybe just annoyed. It’s hard to tell. The line work is so thick it hides the details, which is honestly kind of cool. It feels more honest than the polished stuff we get now. It’s just ink, paper, and a lot of ambition that went nowhere. 🎞️
I’m not saying it’s a masterpiece. It’s barely a thing. But it stays in your head. Like a song you heard once in a dream and can’t quite hum back the right way.