Jan Švankmajer
- 1982Dimensions of Dialogue
- 1988Alice
- 1996Conspirators of Pleasure
Echoed in
- The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer1984
He made clay heads eat each other and a stuffed rabbit tear its way out of a glass case, and the Czechoslovak state stopped him filming for seven years.
Švankmajer was born in Prague in 1934. He grew up with a home puppet theatre and studied puppetry and stage design at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In 1960 he founded the Theatre of Masks at the Semafor theatre, where he met the painter Eva Dvořáková. She became Eva Švankmajerová, his wife and collaborator until her death in 2005.
His first film, The Last Trick (1964), set live actors against animated objects, and he kept doing that for the rest of his career. In 1970 he and Eva joined the Czech Surrealist Group around Vratislav Effenberger. From 1972 to 1979 he was banned from filming after refusing to compromise on the post-production of The Castle of Otranto, and he spent those years designing sets and special effects at Barrandov Studios.
Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) won the short film Golden Bear in Berlin in 1983. In 1991 he and the producer Jaromír Kallista bought a former cinema in the village of Knovíz and turned it into Athanor, his own studio, where he made features from Faust (1994) to Insects (2018). The Quay brothers paid tribute to him in The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984), and Terry Gilliam named Dimensions of Dialogue among the ten best animated films.
Films
Where to start with Jan Švankmajer, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Still from Dimensions of Dialogue to come. Dimensions of Dialogue
Three dialogues: heads built from food and tools in the manner of Arcimboldo chew each other into identical paste, two clay lovers melt together and then fight, and two clay heads push out mismatched objects from their tongues. It won the Golden Bear for best short film at Berlin in 1983.
Still from Alice to come. Alice
A girl follows a stuffed rabbit, real fur and glass eyes, which leaks sawdust after it breaks out of its display case, into a Wonderland made of drawers, jars and old toys. Kristýna Kohoutová plays Alice and also speaks every other character's lines, with close-ups of her mouth saying who said them.
Still from Conspirators of Pleasure to come. Conspirators of Pleasure
Six Prague neighbours spend a week building private erotic rituals: a chicken costume, feathered rolling pins, bread balls rolled in secret, a carp in a bathtub. Nobody speaks a line of dialogue.
Still from Little Otik to come. Little Otik
A childless man carves a baby from a tree stump, his wife treats it as their son, and it comes to life and starts eating everything, then everyone, in their apartment block. Based on Karel Jaromír Erben's folk tale Otesánek, it won the Czech Lion for best film.
Echoed in
Where Švankmajer's ideas turned up next.