Animation Breakdown presents The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer
Sensei to the Brothers Quay, championed as a hero by Terry Gilliam and hailed by Milos Forman as “Disney + Buñuel” — Jan Svankmajer is perhaps our greatest living surrealist master. Firmly established as world cinema’s go-to guru for the grotesque and perverse, his feature films (such as Alice, Little Otik, Lunacy and Conspirators of Pleasure) have introduced countless arthouse audiences to a singular, slanted world of European decay — a delectably skewed stew that twists the familiar (body parts, food, household objects) to reveal the carnal absurdities of the everyday human condition. We celebrate this amazing artist with a full retrospective of all his features to date, plus a program of his head-spinning short films! Touring retrospective organized by Irena Kovarova. Additional support provided by Czech Center New York. All images copyright by Athanor Films.
Watch Cinefamily’s original trailer for “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer”!
Surviving Life
Surviving Life, the most recent — and if his claims are to be believed, last — offering of madness from Jan Švankmajer begins with an apology from the director himself. It seems the Czech master of surrealist animation intended the feature to be fully live-action, but due to budgetary restraints, was forced to adopt a cut-out style (à la Terry Gilliam’s work for Monty Python) to convey the bulk of his twisted tale. A self-described “psychoanalytical comedy,” the film follows the travails of soul-deadened office worker Eugene, as he attempts by way of therapy to reconcile his dreary waking life with his increasingly bizarre and rewarding dream life. The two lives quickly begin to get jumbled, however, yielding an onslaught of wild, prismatic visions replete with arguing portraits of Jung and Freud, enormous wrestling tongues and a nude woman with a chicken head. Like any Švankmajer film, Surviving Life is a unique and twisted vision that must be seen to be believed.
Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 2010, 35mm, 109 min.
Watch the trailer for “Surviving Life”!
Alice
The most gloriously macabre “Alice” adaptation ever filmed, Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 live-action/animation masterpiece of fur, bones, clicks, creaks and squeaks captivates from the very first frame, as it immediately envelops you in its Iron-Curtain-fantasy-by-way-of-Eraserhead spell. In Svankmajer’s world, the character of Alice is almost incidental to the truly incredible (and at times, genuinely shocking) menagerie of makeshift critters that populate this sawdust-and-grime Wonderland. As Alice is pelted, chased and simply baffled by the increasing madness, the film’s intense, completely enveloping sound design — which highly accentuates every rickety footstep, drop of liquid, turning gear and rustled leaf — becomes a delirious and visceral symphony to which the sound of all future dreamscapes should be measured. Definitely best seen and heard on the big screen, Svankmajer’s tour de force of weirdness remains unparalleled, even in the infinite gallery of Alice permutations.
Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 1988, 35mm, 84 min.
Watch an excerpt from “Alice”!
Lunacy
“Ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to see is a horror film — with all the degeneracy peculiar to that genre. It is not a work of art. Today, art is all but dead anyway.” — Jan Svankmajer’s on-screen introduction to Lunacy
Overflowing with remarkable images that remain impossible to un-see, Lunacy is a love poem to that one ineffable fact about human existence: that we’re all nothing but walking bags of meat. Punctuated by by an extraordinary series of stop-motion vignettes starring disembodied tongues, sinew and flesh, the film — inspired by both Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis De Sade (“to whom the film owes its blasphemy and subversiveness”) — is a refreshingly bizarre investigation of freedom, control and punishment. “I am neither fool nor hypocrite,” declares the Marquis, as he rescues a mentally disturbed young man and whisks him off to his estate for bizarre sexual rituals and mindfucks, and then on to an experimental lunatic asylum for his final cure. Svankmajer’s most explicit exploration of madness, and his most erotically-charged work, Lunacy is like Quills on acid — with a side of raw meat!
Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 2005, 35mm, 118 min.
Watch the trailer for “Lunacy”!
Faust
Svankmajer used every weapon in his animated arsenal — including actual fire and brimstone — to bring his own unflinching fever dream of Faust to life. A broiling carnival of demon puppets and unsettling lyricism, the film follows an Everyman through Prague as he choreographs his own ruin. Though every frame is unmistakably his, Svankmajer’s Faust is dizzy with allusions — nightmarish life-size puppets of Lucifer and Helen of Troy kick up the ashes of Marlowe, Goethe, and Kafka as the timeless story furtively dismantles and reassembles itself. Svankmajer finds increasingly novel ways to illustrate the Everyman’s tenuous (and debatable) relationship with his own free will — an egg cracked open turns the whole world dark, pointed cuts reveal human hands manipulating puppet strings. As in the Faust legend itself, it’s the creator’s cryptic intentions that transform an old saw about a deal with the devil into a mirror of unspeakable existential horror.
Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 1994, 35mm, 97 min.
Watch an excerpt from “Faust”!
Conspirators of Pleasure
It’s the feel-good fleshly foible fest of the fall season! A sweetly humorous and completely out-there ballet of vignettes on the subject of surrealistic self-gratification, Svankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure is the arresting portrait of of hardcore sexual fetishists whose lives pirouette around one another in serendipitous fashion. Inspired by the work of notorious perverts like Luis Bunuel, Max Ernst, Sigmund Freud and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, this one-of-a-kind feature features absolutely no dialogue, instead honing in on the splendiferous depravity of six seemingly “normal” folks whose obsessions bring them together: a postal carrier, a news agent, a newscaster, the newscaster’s husband, a middle-aged woman, and her neighbor. With a fevered intensity that only increases as the storylines weave themselves tighter against each other, Svankmajer’s devious human puppetry reaches its orgasmic zenith in an absurdly comic group climax that displays, according to Film Threat Magazine, a “sympathetic voodoo magic worked by a team of discreet players so intense that genius is sparked, and makes vital and gorgeous the previously inert and obscene.” WOW!
Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 1996, 35mm, 85 min.
Watch Cinefamily’s original trailer for “Conspirators of Pleasure”!
Darkness Light Darkness: Jan Svankmajer Shorts
Svankmajer’s feature films have introduced countless arthouse audiences to a singular, slanted world of European decay — a delectably skewed stew that twists the familiar (body parts, food, household objects) to reveal the carnal absurdities of the everyday human condition — but nowhere is this vision more encapsulated and undiluted than in his prolific and rarely screened short films. Emerging from behind the Iron Curtain in the late ‘60s, his explosive early films evaded rampant governmental censorship by working within the “assumedly safe” medium of the animated short, employing stop-motion, puppetry, cut-out animation, experimental techniques and any means necessary to covertly inject his symbolic subversion into the Czech cinematic bloodstream. Slabs of meat copulating on countertops, bodies crumbling and merging in a sea of ecstatic clay, anthropomorphic food devouring itself and vomiting up more anthropomorphic food — all are right at home within Svankmajer’s mini-morsels of morbidity, but perhaps nowhere more at home as in the shared darkness of a theater, viscerally twitching and flickering on the big screen in 35mm!
Watch Cinefamily’s original trailer for “Darkness Light Darkness: Jan Svankmajer Shorts”!
Little Otik
“Before I was born did you sometimes take me out of your tummy and put me back in again?” Little Otik is Svankmajer at his most viscous — a laboratory’s worth of fluids oozes, bleeds, and trickles through each sequence, capturing with a colorful, saturated beauty the inescapable muckiness of existing in bodies that are driven, and often ruined, by hunger. This Grimm-like fairy tale is narrated by a droll, curious little deviant who witnesses the horrific results of a childless couple’s decision to begin raising a varnished log that gains sentience in response to their parenting. Incidentally, the tree-baby in question — Little Otik — has an insatiable taste for human flesh, and it’s not long before he starts eating the building’s tenants, to the increasing chagrin of his adoring parents. Part fable and part satire, the film skewers society’s passive tendencies toward physical repression with results that are in turn hilarious, gruesome, and visually remarkable. The scope of Svankmajer’s stop-motion and puppetry are unprecedented here, but it’s the extended Chagall-inspired cut-out animation storybook segment that binds Little Otik‘s gooey experiments into something strangely sublime.
Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 2000, 35mm, 132 min.
Watch an excerpt from “Little Otik”!
