Presented in association with the Czech Center, New York, the Czech Endowment Chair, and the Austin Film Society.
I am not interested in animated film in its totality. I am only interested in the technical aspect of the craft in relation to what I want to express – and technique is the crucial medium through which I can endow real objects with a magical power of their own. This is how magic becomes part of daily life, invading daily life, magic enters into quite ordinary contact with mundane things. The normal contact that people are accustomed to suddenly acquires a different dimension, one that makes reality appear doubtful.
Unless we again begin to tell fairy tales and ghost stories before going to sleep and recounting our dreams upon waking, nothing more is to be expected of our Western civilization.
One of the great Czech filmmakers, JAN SVANKMAJER was born in 1934 in Prague where he still lives. He trained at the Institute of Applied Arts from 1950 to 1954 and then at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts (Department of Puppetry). He soon became involved in the Theatre of Masks and the famous Black Theatre, before entering the Laterna Magika Puppet Theatre where he first encountered film. In 1970 he met his wife, the surrealist painter Eva Svankmajerova, and the late Vratislav Effenberger, the leading theoretician of the Czech Surrealist Group, which Svankmajer joined and of which he still remains a member.
Svankmajer made his first film in 1964 and for over thirty years has made some of the most memorable and unique animated films ever made, influencing filmmakers from Tim Burton to The Brothers Quay. In 1987 Svankmajer completed his first feature film, ALICE. Svankmajer has moved further away from his roots in animation towards live-action filmmaking, though his vision remains as strikingly surreal and uncannily inventive as ever.
This is an ultra-rare screening of archival prints on loan from the Prague Film Archive. Only three of these films are currently available in the US,
the programs
Except as noted, all prints courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.
1.
THE NATURAL WORLD
Sunday, September 23rd, 4pm
Alamo Draft House
HISTORIA NATURAE
1967, 10 min.
A tour de force of montage and taxonomy, juxtaposing classifications of the natural world with the fate of the human one as the vast collections of Emperor Rudolf II come to life.
DARKNESS, LIGHT, DARKNESS
1989, First Run Features, 8 min.
A creature emerges from the primordial ooze and evolves into a man, one of Svankmajer’s funniest and most pessimistic statements on the progress of Mankind.
JABBERWOCKY
1971, 14 min.
Svankmajer's first adaptation of Lewis Carroll's world is a magical film in which "the inanimate becomes animate, with the pace and constancy of the film’s animation creating a sort of delirium in which the objects are free to act out their innermost desires." (Simon Field, Monthly Film Bulletin)
J. S. BACH: FANTASY IN G MINOR
1965, 8 min.
Svankmajer’s second film contrasts Bach’s music with a very physical exploration of decay and decomposition of stone. "A singularly imaginative treatment of Bach’s music, replacing the normally regal and religious imagery, the architecural spendour, with a rampant materiality and fragmentation." (Michael O’Pray, Sight and Sound)
ET CETERA
1966, 8 min.
A rich and brilliant film on the futility of progress, done with the simplest of means.
DIMENSIONS OF DIALOGUE
1982, 12 min.
One of the most profound and startling shorts ever made. Archimbaldo heads cannibalize and devour each other, lovers mingle (literally!) in the ecstasy of one-ness, and tongues communicate via a rock-paper-scissors game. "Moznosti Dialogu translates better as Possibilities of Dialogue— possibilities which, according to the evidence offered here, seem limited indeed." (Julian Petley, Monthly Film Bulletin)
2.
THE UNNATURAL WORLD
Sunday, September 23rd, 5:30pm
Alamo Draft House
DOWN TO THE CELLAR
1983, Slovak Film Institute, 16 min.
A little girl is sent to the cellar to fetch potatoes— with harrowing results. "For Svankmajer, the ‘innocence’ of childhood is itself shot through with terror and horror…. The girl plucks up her courage to deny these fantasies, and we can only assume that her ability to recognize them as such is, in Svanmajer’s terms, a compliment, and one he is unlikely to offer an adult." (Michael O’Pray, Monthly Film Bulletin)
THE FLAT
1969, 12 min.
A Kafka-esque tale of a man trapped inside a one-room apartment with a mind of its own. "The astonishing technique, the directness and harsh materiality that characterise Svankmajer, is at its most uncompromising in The Flat… But there is also a humor bred no doubt of the Czech tradition itself. The hero’s defeat when he adds his name to the others behind the door…is also an act of communion with the rest of humanity." (Michael O’Pray, Monthly Film Bulletin)
THE PIT, PENDULUM AND HOPE
1983, 17 min.
One of the strangest and most terrifying adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe, an intense film in which a subjective camera places the audience in the position of the torture victim.
VIRILE GAMES
First Run Features, 1988, 17 min.
With its focus on contemporary issues, this graphic exploration of soccer, beer, television, and the modern man marked a departure in Svankmajer’s work, and must be the most violent and startling claymation film ever.
3.
LIFE IN THE SOVIET BLOC AND OTHER VIOLENCES
Sunday, September 23rd, 7pm
Alamo Draft House
THE LAST TRICK
1964, 12 min.
Svankmajer’s first film— without animation— already demonstrates his combinations of live-action, animation, sound and camera movements. Two magicians rival each other to demonstrate their skills before an unseen audience, leading to an orgy of mutual mutilation.
PUNCH AND JUDY
1966, 10 min.
Two puppets barter for posession of a guinea pig in an exchange that quickly escalates into fight to the death. "PUNCH AND JUDY contains some of the most astonishing editing to be found in Svankmajer’s work…making the term ‘animator’ hopelessly inadequate to describe his intensely filmic treatment of animated material." (Michael O’Pray, Monthly Film Bulletin).
LEONARDO'S DIARY
1972, 10 min.
Da Vinci meets Surrealism as the Renaissance artist’s famous sketchbooks of grotesque faces and impossible machines come to life. This is the film that got Svankmajer banned from making movies for 7 years.
THE DEATH OF STALINISM IN BOHEMIA
1990, 11 min.
Made shortly after the VELVET REVOLUTION, this is Svankmajerian agit-prop. This short history of Czechoslovakia since WW2 makes cathartic use of animation and archival footage to mock Stalin and Czech Communist Party leader Gottwald.
FOOD
Zeitgeist Films, 1992, 17 min.
Based on a screenplay originally written in 1970, this film turns eating into an activity both routine and mechanized, and filled with strangeness and violence. "Its end is more shocking than the excesses of Viennese ‘action painting,’ and affects us more deeply than all the rivers of blood, violence and atrocity which come rolling off our cinema and television screens daily." (Ludvîk Svâb, "Jan Svanmajer’s Viennese Menu")
Except as noted, all prints courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.
