Jan Švankmajer

Doctor honoris causa Jan Švankmajer
Jan Švankmajer (2024)
Born	(1934-09-04)September 4, 1934 Prague
Education	Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague
Known for	Czech film director of animated, puppet and live-action films, animator, writer, playwright and surrealist (drawing, graphics, collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages)
Notable work	Animated films
Style	informel, surrealism, tactilism, art brut
Spouse	Eva Švankmajerová
Children	Veronika Hrubá, Václav Švankmajer
Awards	Czech Lion Awards - Unique Contribution to Czech Film (1994), Best Design (Faust, 1994, Little Otik, 2001, Surviving Life, 2010), Best Stage Design (Insects), 2018), Grand Prix and International Critics Award, Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Golden Bear, Berlinale (Dimensions of Dialogue, 1983), Prix special for lifelong achievement, International Animated Film Association (1990), FITES Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Development of Audiovisual Culture (2008), Freedom Award for Lifetime Achievement (Andrzej Wajda Award), Berlinale (2001)

Jan Švankmajer (* 4 September 1934 Prague) is a Czech film director, animator, writer, playwright and artist. He draws and makes free graphics, collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages. In the early 1960s, he explored informel, which later became an important part of the visual form of his animated films. He is a leading representative of late Czech surrealism. In his film work, he created an unmistakable and quite specific style, determined primarily by a compulsively unorthodox combination of externally disparate elements. The anti-artistic nature of this process, based on collage or assemblage, functions as a meaning-making factor. The author himself claims that the intersubjective communication between him and the viewer works only through evoked associations, and his films fulfil their subversive mission only when, even in the most fantastic moments, they look like a record of reality. Some of the works he created together with his wife Eva Švankmajerová.

Life and films

Jan Švankmajer's father was a window dresser and his mother a seamstress. His childhood was profoundly influenced by a home puppet theatre, which he received as an eight-year-old boy for Christmas and gradually made his own puppets and painted the sets. Švankmajer admits that since then, puppets have been firmly embedded in his mental morphology, and he always resorts to them when he feels threatened by the reality of the outside world. He sees them not only in the context of theatre, but as a ritual symbol used in magic. The ludicative principle on which Švankmajer's work is based has its roots in his childhood.

In 1950-1954 he graduated in scenography at the Higher School of Art Industry in Prague, under Prof. Richard Lander, where he designed and made puppets and sets. His classmates were Aleš Veselý and photographer Jan Svoboda. He then studied directing and stage design at the Department of Puppets at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (1954-1958), where Lander moved to as a teacher at that time. Even during the most rigid Stalinist regime, the atmosphere at the school was liberal and forbidden books on French modern art circulated among the students, brought by the painting teacher Karel Tondl. His classmate and friend was the later film director Juraj Herz. At the end of his studies, he took part in a sightseeing trip to Poland, where he saw reproductions of Paul Klee's works for the first time.

During his studies, he staged the folk puppeteers' play Don Šajn (Don Juan) at the then Small Theatre D 34 (1957-1958), led by Emil František Burian. In addition to D 34 theatre, he attended the Liberated Theatre and became acquainted with the works of the Russian avant-garde (Mejerhold, Eisenstein). In his graduation performance (C. Gozzi, The King Stag) he used a combination of puppets with live actors in masks. Soon after graduation in 1958, he participated as a puppeteer in Radok's short film Johannes Doctor Faust, inspired by folk puppeteers. During the filming he met composer Zdeněk Liška, cinematographer Svatopluk Malý and designer Vlastimil Beneš. He briefly worked as a director and designer at the State Puppet Theatre in Liberec (the predecessor of Studio Ypsilon). In 1958-1960, he completed his compulsory military service in Mariánské Lázně, where he drew and painted intensively (Men, pen, watercolour on pressed paper, 1959).

After returning from the army in 1960, he founded the group Theatre of Masks, which belonged to the Semafor theatre. During the preparation of the first production of Starched Heads, he met Eva Dvořáková, whom he later married. Other productions of the Theatre of Masks were Johannes Doctor Faust, The Collector of Shadows, Circus Sucric. In 1962 he exhibited his drawings in the corridor of the Semafor and Vlastimil Beneš and Zbyněk Sekal, who visited the exhibition, invited him to join the Máj 57 group. He took part in the fourth exhibition of the Máj group in Poděbrady (1961), which was banned after three days, and then exhibited with the members of the group until the end of the 1960s.

The avant-garde Theatre of Masks did not fit Semafor's profile as a musical stage. In 1962, Jiří Suchý closed it down, but Emil Radok facilitated the engagement of the entire group of the Theatre of Masks in Magician's Lantern. In this year Jan Švankmajer made his first trip to Paris. In 1963 his daughter Veronika was born. After leaving Semafor, he worked until 1964 as director and head of the Black light theatre company at Magician's Lantern. He directed two performances for the Variations programmes and later also externally for the Magic Circus, The Lost Fairy Tale. At the same time, together with Emil Radok, he was making up scripts for future films.

In 1964 he made his first short film, The Last Trick, based on the principles of black theatre. It features elements typical of all his subsequent work, such as the dynamic use of montage and the juxtaposition of live actors with animated objects. The film was successful abroad, and in the following years Švankmajer was given the opportunity to make short films combining puppetry, animation and elements of live action. In his early films, composed as short grotesques, black humour and peculiarly interpreted poetics of folk puppet plays prevail. In the second film from 1964, Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasia in G minor, the visual component is a kind of mannerist informel with a recognizable influence of surrealist photographs by Emila Medková. In 1965, he made the film Spiel mit steinen (Playing with Stones) practically alone, with the help of Eva Švankmajerová and cinematographer Petr Puluj in Austria. He tried out various animation techniques, later used, for example, in the film Dimensions of Dialogue. For the Expo 67 competition in Montreal, he made a short film Man and Technique and participated in the film Digits by Pavel Procházka. In 1968 the Švankmajer family moved to the house No. 97/5 in Nový svět (Hradčany).

In 1968, he signed manifesto The Two Thousand Words. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the whole family emigrated to Austria at the instigation of Eva Švankmajerová. Here he made his second film in an Austrian production in the studio of Peter Puluj (Picknick mit Weissmann). In 1968, he received the Max Ernst Prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival for his film Historia naturae. In 1969 the family decided to return to Czechoslovakia. In 1970 he met Vratislav Effenberger and together with Eva Švankmajerová they became members of the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia. Between 1971 and 1989 they contributed to samizdat edited anthologies Le-La and catalogues (Open Game, Sphere of Dream, Transformations of Humour, Imaginative Spaces, Opposite of the Mirror). After 1989 to the first and only issue of the anthology Gambra and then to the magazine Analogon.

During the short period up to 1970 Švankmajer still managed to make the "Kafkaesque" allegorical short films The Garden, The Apartment and Silent Week in the House, the morbid Ossuary and the "puppet" film Don Šajn (1970), in which marionettes are replaced by live actors who have wires and guide strings attached to their papier-mâché heads, symbolizing the theme of human manipulation and the limitations of individual freedom. After the advent of the normalization regime, Švankmajer's creative work was hampered by censorship and his short films The Garden and The Apartment ended up in the vault. In 1972, as a volunteer, he underwent an experiment with intravenous administration of LSD at the Střešovice Military Hospital. The experiment had a devastating effect on him, with anxiety states that he still recalls in his work 30 years later.

In 1972-1979 he was banned from filming because he refused to make compromise on the post-production of his film The Castle of Otranto, based on a gothic novel by H. Walpole. In 1973-1980 he worked as a production designer and film trick maker at Barrandov Studios. In 1975 his son Václav was born. In the 1970s, Jan Švankmajer worked as a stage designer at the Theatre on the Balustrade, the Večerní Brno Theatre, and especially at The Drama Club, where he was invited by Jaroslav Vostrý (Candide, The Educator, Crackle on the Lagoon, The Golden Carriage). Eva Švankmajerová participated in the performances as a costume designer and stage designer. Since 1976 he and his wife Eva have been creating ceramics under the joint pseudonym Kostelec.

As a trick designer and production designer in Barrandov Studios, he collaborated] on the films of Oldřich Lipský (Dinner for Adele, 1977, The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians, 1981) and Juraj Herz (The Ninth Heart, 1978, Upír z Feratu (The Vampire of Ferat), 1981). At the end of his persecution, he filmed two of Poe's short stories, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope, using themes from the work of Villiers de l'Isle Adam. In 1981 Jan and Eva Švankmajer bought a dilapidated castle in Horní Stankov, where they wanted to set up a ceramics workshop. Since then, they have been gradually reconstructing the castle and transforming it into a surreal Cabinet of Curiosities, consisting of their own artefacts and various collections of art and natural objects. Švankmajer's collecting is a form of self-therapy, and in addition to found or purchased objects, it includes art from the natural peoples of Africa and Polynesia.

A retrospective of Švankmajer's films from the 1960s attracted international attention at the 1983 FIFA International Film Festival in Annency. He received the Grand Prix and the International Critics' Prize for the Dimensions of Dialogue and the Golden Bear at the Berlinale the same year. Terry Gilliam ranks this film among the ten best animated films of all time. At home, Švankmajer became a victim of the score settling between the management of Czechoslovak Television and Short Film Prague, and Dimensions of Dialogue was shown to the ideological committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia's Central Committee as a deterrent. After that, he was again unable to work at Short Film studios and went to Bratislava, where he made the film Do pivnice (Into the cellar) in 1983. In the same year, he published his book Hmat a imaginace (Touch and Imagination) in five copies as a samizdat, summarising the results of his tactile experiments since 1974. He managed to secure money abroad for his project Alice, but the studios of Short Film and Barandov were not interested in filming. At that time, the state had a monopoly on all film production. So he turned to Jaromír Kallista, whom he knew as the producer of Magician's Lantern, and asked him if he would direct the project with him as an independent film.

He presented his first feature-length film Alice, which was made during 1987 almost exclusively in a Swiss production (Condor Films), in 1988. The work was a worldwide success and won the Best Animated Feature Award at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival (JICA). At the same time, The Dimensions of Dialogue won the Grand Prize for the best film in the festival history. In 1990, he made the political grotesque agitprop film The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia and in 1992 the short work Food, in which he comes to terms with his gastronomic obsessions.

In the following years he devoted himself exclusively to directing feature films. The house at 27 Nerudova Street (Malá Strana), where Švankmajer had his film studio, was privatised and he had to leave it in the middle of the filming of The Faust. In 1991, together with Jaromír Kallista, he bought a former cinema in the village of Knovíz and founded his own film studio ATHANOR, where he made next films. At the prestigious Cardiff Animation Film Festival (1992) he was awarded the First IFA Prize and the BBC presented a show of his animated films over two nights.

In 1994, Švankmajer's second feature film The Faust was premiered, starring Petr Čepek in the dual roles of Faust and Mephisto. Faust, a random man in the crowd, is manipulated by the entire plot and become accustomed to the role of Faust, which he plays to the bitter end. The film is an attempt at actual interpretation of the Faust myth and asks the question of what a man is allowed to know without destroying himself. This relationship is highly ambivalent and therefore provokes contradictory interpretations. The filming was accompanied by a series of tragic deaths and unexplained circumstances, and Petr Čepek himself completed the film at a time when he was already seriously ill. For this performance Čepek was awarded the Czech Lion in memoriam. The film was selected for the prestigious out-of-competition screening at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1994, Short Film Prague released a set of 26 Švankmajer's films on cassettes. In Great Britain, Jan Švankmajer received the Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1996 Švankmajer made Conspirators of Pleasure, a black comedy about people who follow the principle of pleasure and perform harmless imaginative perversions and rituals. He contrasts their personal freedom with the moderating and repressive role of society, education or school. The film is a sarcastic satire on the contemporary world full of sexual perversions and erotic fetishes. Švankmajer has made the most of his many years of artistic experiments on the subject of tactilism. He concluded the film with the words: I believe that black and objective humour, mystification and the cynicism of fantasy are more adequate means of expressing the decadence of the times than the hypocritical, but popular "smell of humanity" in Czech films.

The following film Little Otik (2000) won the Czech Lion for Best Film and Best Art Direction (together with Eva Švankmajerová). In 2003 FAMU awarded Jan Švankmajer the title of Doctor honoris causa.

During 2004, Eva and Jan Švankmajer had a retrospective exhibition Memory of Animation - Animation of Memory in Pilsen and an exhibition called Food in the Prague Castle Riding Hall. Both were a great success with the general public and were considered by critics to be the artistic event of the year. A retrospective of 30 of his films was shown as part of the Pilsen Film Festival on the occasion of the author's 70th birthday.

On 17 November 2005, the film Lunacy premiered, which is conceived as a philosophical horror film inspired by the personality of the Marquis de Sade and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Eva Švankmajerová, who died shortly before the premiere, was awarded the Czech Lion in memoriam for the artistic concept and poster for this film. Their daughter Veronika Hrubá also collaborated on the film. Student Jurry at the Pilsen Film Festival awarded Lunacy as the Best Feature Film. At the 2009 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Jan Švankmajer received the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema.

His last feature film so far, Insects, based on Švankmajer's 1971 short story (inspired by the play Pictures from the Insects' Life of the Čapek brothers, with a reference to Kafka's The Metamorphosis), was screened at film festivals in 2018 and had its UK premiere at the Tate Modern. The Rotterdam festival screened Insects in the section Signatures dedicated to great authors and filmmakers.Jan Švankmajer has established an exclusive position in the history of cinema and is recognized as one of the few contemporary Czech filmmakers abroad. By 2018, he had received 36 awards and 17 nominations for his films worldwide, including the 2018 Raymond Roussel Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Film, awarded by the Raymond Roussel Society in Barcelona.

Since 1970, Jan Švankmajer has participated in the activities of the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia and is the chairman of the editorial board of the Analogon magazine (104 issues until 2024), to which he also contributes. In 1990, he participated in the collective exhibition of the Surrealist Group The Third Ark in Prague's Mánes. Since 1991 he has been a member of Mánes Union of Fine Arts. He animates his films alone (The Fall of the House of Usher) or in collaboration with top animators such as Vlasta Pospíšilová and Bedřich Glaser. In his feature films, he has collaborated with friends from his time at The Drama Club (Jiří Hálek, Petr Čepek) and other proven actors (Jan Kraus, Jiří Lábus, Pavel Nový, Jan Tříska, Martin Huba, Pavel Liška, Václav Helšus, Anna Geislerová, Veronika Žilková, Klára Issová, etc.).

Jan Švankmajer uncompromisingly defends his personal freedom and rejects any official awards granted by state authorities. In 1989 he rejected the Merited Artist award, in the 1990s the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 2011 the award proposed by Václav Havel. He considers the state as a source of organized violence and means of oppression and manipulation.

Eva Švankmajerová participated in some of the films as a stage and production designer. Their son Václav Švankmajer is also a successful filmmaker, including The Torchbearer. He contributed to the artwork for the film Insects (2018). Švankmajer's daughter Veronika Hrubá collaborated as a costume designer on the films Lunacy (Czech Lion Award), Surviving Life, and Insects.

Awards (selection)

• 1964 Awards at film festivals in Bergamo, Mannheim, Tours, Buenos Aires
• 1965 Third Prize for short film Cannes Film Festival - (J.S. Bach - Fantasia G-moll)
• 1966 Josef von Sternberg Award, Mannheim-Heidelberg International Filmfestival - (Rakvičkárna (Punch and Judy)
• 1967 Festival of short films Karlovy Vary, Trilobit Award
• 1968 Max Ernst Prize, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen - (Historia naturae)
• 1983 Grand Prix, International Critic´s Prize, Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Golden Bear, Berlinale - (Dimensions of Dialogue)
• 1984 Jury Prize, Montreal World Film Festival - (The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope)
• 1985 Critic´s Prize, Fantasporto - (The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope)
• 1989 Grand Prix, Cinanima (International Animated Film Festival, Portugal) - (Darkness/Light/Darkness), Feature Film Award, Annecy International Animation Film Festival - (Alice)
• 1990 Honorable mention for short film, Berlinale - (Darkness/Light/Darkness)
• 1990 Prix special for previous works (best film of 30 years of presentations of animated films), ASIFA
• 1994 Special jury prize, nomination: Crystal Globe (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival) - (Faust)
• 1994 Czech Lion Award for outstanding contribution to Czech cinema, nomination: Best director, Best script - (Faust)
• 1995 Lifetime Achievement Award, Great Britain, Best speciaal effects, Fantasporto, Annual Czech Film Critics Award Kristián - (Faust)
• 1996 Youth Jury Award, Locarno Film Festival
• 1997 Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, San Francisco International Film Festival
• 2001 Czech Lion Award, KVIFF: Best design, nomination: Best director, Best script - (Little Otik)
• 2001 Andrzej Wajda Freedom Prize, American Cinema Foundation
• 2002 Annual Czech Film Critics Award Kristián - (Little Otik)
• 2006 Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Development of Audiovisual Culture FITES
• 2006 Award for the best artistic achievement, Sun in a Net Award, Slovak FTA - (Lunacy)
• 2009 Crystal Globe (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival) For outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema
• 2010 Czech Lion Award - Best Artwork, Czech Film Critics' Award - nomination: Best director, Best script - (Surviving Life)
• 2010 Award for lifetime contribution to cinematography, 5th European Film Festival in Segovia, Spain
• 2012 Best Artwork, Sun in a Net Award, Slovak FTA - (Surviving Life)
• 2014 Award of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), Karlovy Vary
• 2018 Czech Lion Award - Best film script - (Insects), nomination: Best director - (Insects)
• 2018 Czech Film Critics' Award for best audiovisual achievement - (Insects)
• 2018 Medal of Raymond Roussel for Lifetime Achievement in Film, Barcelona
• 2019 Best stage design, Sun in a Net Award, Slovak FTA - (Insects)
• 2020 Czech Lion Award nomination: Best documentary (Alchymická pec)

Work

Švankmajer's hard-to-classify artistic style developed in the 1960s in parallel with his work in the theatre and animated films. Jan Švankmajer's early drawings were inspired by Paul Klee. Around 1960, he briefly dealt with structural abstraction, but soon returned to figuration and from the late 1960s onwards embraced surrealism. His objects from the early 1960s can be classified as informel only formally, on the basis of similarities in expressivity and surface structure, but in reality they were real objects, subjected to a process of transformation as "accelerated aging" or ornamentation. However, his preoccupation with informel runs through his entire film oeuvre, as macro details of scratched walls and age-marked objects, or the sudden transformation of things into undifferentiated matter, form a significant part of the visual form of his animated films. His Springs objects - usually shoes, mineralized in Karlovy Vary spring water - date from 2009.

He became a member of the Surrealist Group, which was formed around Vratislav Effenberger, at a time when the group was going through a crisis. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the ban on publishing was reinstated, many people went into exile and others resigned from the group. At the same time, the Surrealist movement in France disintegrated. Jan and Eva Švankmajer had a significant influence on the revival of the activities of the Surrealist Group. The group's interest in all kinds of imaginative experiments was the basis for the creation of collective anthologies devoted to the themes of interpretation, analogy, eroticism and tactilism. Švankmajer considers imagination to be a gift that humanizes man.

As artist, he was later influenced by the Surrealists Max Ernst, R. Magritte, G. Chirico, of the older ones Hieronymus Bosch and especially the Mannerism of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Švankmajer's films Playing with Stones, Historia naturae and Dimensions of Dialogue have a direct connection with the principles of Arcimboldo's Mannerist painting. His collections of curiosities (similar to Rudolf II's kunstkomora), folk puppetry, naive folk art, African and Polynesian masks and fetishes, and art brut are strong and lasting inspirations.

He is interested in the authenticity of folk puppetry and the magic associated with puppets, rather than puppets as mere artistic devices or props for animation. The puppet and the thread or guide wire, as an analogy of man's destiny and his connection to something above him that determines his fate, are known from various religions and myths. It is a space for the realization of the "impossible", incompatible with good education, for the realization of even seemingly incredible dreams. The child-puppeteer is thus in fact a shaman, a god and a creator.

He cites the French Poète maudit, German Romanticism (Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann), and the Surrealists (A. Breton, K. Teige, B. Péret, V. Effenberger) as major literary sources. The literary inspiration for Švankmajer's films were the works of Lewis Caroll, E. A. Poe, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam or Marquis de Sade. His interpretation of other authors' literary works is ultimately a subjective account that preserves only the terrors, dreams, and infantilism of the world he shares with them.

In Švankmajer´s film work, his sense of the concrete irrationality of plots corresponds to some of the types of aggressive cinematic civilism that was applied in the works of the directors of the Czechoslovak "New Wave" (Miloš Forman, Pavel Juráček). His work shares a certain "oppositional" attitude with the films of the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s, but otherwise escapes any classification. Among world theatre directors and filmmakers, he was inspired by the Russian avant-garde theatre artists V. Meyerhold, A. Tairov and Bauhaus artist O. Schlemmer, by filmmakers S. Eisenstein and D. Vertov. He described films Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or by Buñuel and Dalí, Amarcord, [[Roma (1972 film)|] by F. Fellini and, among the works close to animation, the films of Méliès and David Bowers as a defining cinematic experience. Of contemporary directors, he is close to David Lynch or the Quay brothers.

Švankmajer makes films only when they are finished in his imagination, but during the shooting process he does not stick to the script, he looks for new sources of inspiration and tries to reach an acceptable compromise with the original intention. He himself states that filmmaking is a kind of self-therapy, and in his works he repeatedly comes to terms with his idiosyncrasies, anxieties and obsessions that originated in his childhood. His preference for "decadent genres" such as folk puppets and sets, fair-ground mechanical targets, and black novels is at the root of his anti-aesthetic attitude towards filmmaking. Not only his films, but also his collages, prints, ceramics and three-dimensional objects are based on his infantile worldview, which took the form of a puppet stage with symmetrically cut sets and figures hanging on strings. The alchemical and kabbalistic history of Prague is an undoubted inspiration for him, and his work builds on these sources and combines it with surrealism. Surrealism and Mannerism, which are anchored in the duality of opposites - rationalism with the irrational, sensualism with spiritualism, tradition with innovation, convention with revolt - create the necessary tension for creative activity. In his view, Surrealism represents a contemporary form of Romanticism that restores art to its magical dignity.

Švankmajer strives to make his films, even in their most fantastic moments, look like records of reality. As a filmmaker, he is particularly renowned for his ability to animate any material. He sees film animation not as a technique, but as a magical means capable of animating inanimate matter and thus realising an original infantile desire. In his conception, animation is a transformation or transmutation of matter - from an object to its parts or essence and vice versa, and is close to alchemy. As a hermeticist, he believes that objects touched by people in moments of heightened sensibility have an inner life of their own and somehow preserve the contents of the subconscious. In The Fall of the House of Usher, he replaced people with objects that became vehicles for the plot and the emotions of the acting characters and the atmosphere of the story.

According to Effenberger, the secret of Švankmajer's imaginative humour lies in the fact that when he juxtaposes lyrical pathos and raw reality, the rawness fades along with the pathos and lyrical reality becomes what it is in the eyes of a child or a poet. In the alternation of genres, the cementing thread in his films is the dream logic, where apparent contingencies take on the form of inescapable fatality and guide the viewer smoothly through the story - the dream. There are no logical transitions between dream and reality, only the physical act of opening and closing the eyelids.

Švankmajer's films are subversive and do not conform to any taboos, conventions or prescriptions of reason. They are a rebellion against the consumerist world, a radical revolution, a liberation from rigid reality and a return to the world of free play. He sees destruction as a creative way of challenging rationality, but his conception of surrealism is exclusive and autonomous. According to Švankmajer, surrealism is a realism that seeks the reality beneath the surface of things and phenomena. What is above reality, meets with hermeticism and psychoanalysis. The author maintains absolute freedom and does not calculate with the taste of the audience - he himself says that he is indifferent whether five or five million viewers come to see his film. His work has also influenced several foreign filmmakers, such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Quay brothers, and Henry Selick.

Quotes

...the theme of freedom, the only theme for which it is still worth picking up a pen, brush or camera...

...it is not worth striving for less than absolute freedom. Society will truncate it beyond recognition in the process anyway. If you start lower than at absolute freedom, you will have no freedom at the end.

...the creative act gives meaning and rebellion (revolt) dignity to life. ibid. p. 362

...I think that without revolt a normal, decent person cannot live. There is no society that is so ideal that one does not have to revolt against it...

Filmography

Feature-length films

Year	English title	Original title	Notes
1988	Alice	Něco z Alenky	Based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
1994	Faust	Lekce Faust	Based on the Faust legend (including traditional Czech puppet show versions), Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Goethe's Faust.
1996	Conspirators of Pleasure	Spiklenci slasti
2000	Little Otik	Otesánek	Based on Otesánek by Karel Jaromír Erben
2005	Lunacy	Šílení	Based on The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether and The Premature Burial by Edgar Allan Poe
2010	Surviving Life	Přežít svůj život
2018	Insects	Hmyz	Based on Pictures from the Insects' Life by Karel Čapek and Josef Čapek
2022	The Kunstcamera	Kunstkamera	Documentary about the art and artifacts Svanmajer and his late wife have gathered over the years.

Short films

Year	English title	Original title	Notes
1964	The Last Trick	Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara
1965	Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasy in G minor	Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasia G-moll
1965	A Game with Stones	Spiel mit Steinen
1966	Punch and Judy	Rakvičkárna	Also known as The Coffin Factory and The Lych House
1966	Et Cetera
1967	Historia Naturae (Suita)
1968	The Garden	Zahrada
1968	The Flat	Byt	Available on the Little Otik DVD. Included in the Metropolitan Museum's "Surrealism Beyond Borders" exhibit (2021–22)
1968	Picnic with Weissmann	Picknick mit Weismann
1969	A Quiet Week in the House	Tichý týden v domě
1970	Don Juan	Don Šajn
1970	The Ossuary	Kostnice	A documentary about the Sedlec Ossuary
1971	Jabberwocky	Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta	Based on Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
1972	Leonardo's Diary	Leonardův deník
1979	Castle of Otranto	Otrantský zámek	Based on The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
1980	The Fall of the House of Usher	Zánik domu Usherů	Based on The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
1982	Dimensions of Dialogue	Možnosti dialogu
1983	Down to the Cellar	Do pivnice
1983	The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope	Kyvadlo, jáma a naděje	Based on The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe and A Torture by Hope by Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
1988	Virile Games	Mužné hry	Also known as The Male Game
1988	Another Kind of Love		Music video for Hugh Cornwell
1988	Meat Love	Zamilované maso
1989	Darkness/Light/Darkness	Tma, světlo, tma
1989	Flora
1989	Animated Self-Portraits		Anthology film by 27 animators
1990	The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia	Konec stalinismu v Čechách
1992	Food	Jídlo

Animation and art direction

Year	English title	Original title	Director
1978	Dinner for Adele	Adéla ještě nevečeřela	Oldřich Lipský
1981	The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians	Tajemství hradu v Karpatech	Oldřich Lipský
1982	Ferat Vampire	Upír z Feratu	Juraj Herz
1983	Visitors	Návštěvníci	Jindřich Polák
1984	Three Veterans	Tři veteráni	Oldřich Lipský

Bibliography

• Peter Hames, Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1995 ISBN 978-0275952990
• Eva Švankmajerová; Jan Švankmajer (1998). Anima Animus Animation - Evašvankmajerjan. Arbor vitae. ISBN 80-901964-4-6.
• Jan Švankmajer (2004). Transmutace smyslů / Transmutation of the Senses. Metrostav. ISBN 8090225837.
• Bertrand Schmitt, František Dryje, Švankmajer, Dimensions of dialogue. Between Film and Fine Art. Prague: Arbor Vitae, 2012 ISBN 978-8074670169
• Jan Švankmajer (2014). Touching and Imagining: An Introduction to Tactile Art. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 9781780761473.

See also

• Jiří Trnka, Czech animator and puppeteer
• Karel Zeman, Czech animator and filmmaker
• Jiří Barta, Czech stop motion animator
• Ladislaw Starewich, Polish animator and puppeteer
• The Torchbearer, a film by Jan Švankmajer's son, Václav
• List of stop motion films

Further reading

• Peter Hames (1995). Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Svankmajer. Praeger Paperback. ISBN 0-275-95299-1.
• Peter Hames (2007). The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy (Directors' Cuts). Wallflower Press. ISBN 978-1905674459.
• Bertrand Schmitt; František Dryje, eds. (2012). Jan Švankmajer. Dimensions of Dialogue / Between Film and Fine Art. Arbor vitae. ISBN 978-80-7467-016-9.
• Michael Richardson (2006). "Jan Svankmajer and the Life of Objects". Surrealism and Cinema. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 9781845202262.
• Keith Leslie Johnson (2017). Jan Švankmajer: Animist Cinema. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252083020.

External links

• Jan Švankmajer at IMDb
• The Animation of Jan Svankmajer at Keyframe - the Animation Resource
• Overview of his work
• Jan Švankmajer - PL (in Polish)
• On Svankmajer's Faust
• The Works of Jan Svankmajer
• Downing the Folk-Festive: Menacing Meals in the Films of Jan Svankmajer
• Czech Animation, private blog
• An article and filmography on Svankmajer
• Review of Dimensions of Dialogue, The Ossuary, Food and Death of Stalinism