An interview with veteran Czech animator and filmmaker Jan Svankmajer about his life and work.

Published in the ‘Persepolis’ issue of Little White Lies

 

Jan Svankmajer – Veteran of Disorder

There is a word that celebrated Czech filmmaker, animator and artist Jan Svankmajer uses throughout our interview to describe the ultimate goal of surrealism – freedom. It is a freedom - of expression, of form, content and movement – that permeates all of his work. The freedom to adopt or disregard formal rigour with a child’s caprice, to flit between animation, stop motion and live action, and to question the received notions of reality and generally find them wanting. “My films are imaginative,” he tells me via Zdena, our translator, "so I would hope that they would work as a trigger, to explode barriers and limits within people, to prepare them for imagination, metamorphosis; to detonate the acceptance of reality and open people up to what I would ultimately call the ‘principle of pleasure’. Art should liberate.”

Born into the alchemical wonder of Prague in 1934, Savnkmajer trained at the adamantly named Institute of Artistic Industry and then at the Fine Arts Academy before becoming involved in the city’s famous Lanterna Magika Theatre. It is here that he met Alfred Radok, a proto-multimedia artist whose ahead-of-the-game mixing of theatre and film on stage alerted Svankmajer to the surreal possibilities of the moving image. “Film for me at that time was ‘cut’! ‘Cut’ and ‘film’ were the same thing to me. I was attracted by the possibilities of cutting and cutting and cutting from one composition to another without the constraints of real time that one had in the theatre.” It is just such a kaleidoscopic version of time and logic that one experiences in dreams, and this relentless editing tempo would be a technique frequently employed by Svankmajer to take the surrealist element of juxtaposition to its illogical extreme.

Arriving at filmmaking during a thaw in the Communist regime marked by the Prague Spring (“Thank God for the sixties, when so many things were possible!”), Svankmajer was afforded the relative artistic freedom to produce such early masterpieces as ‘A Game with Stones’ (’65), a stop-motion pageant in which a Heath Robinson clock/tap absurdity vomits forth clusters of pebbles which episodically enact the full scale of human drama from basic cell division to self-destructive cataclysm.

This freewheeling apprenticeship would be harshly discontinued when Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague in the summer of1968. In the wake of this reassertion of the Red jackboot into the creative rump, Svankmajer nevertheless succeeded in making the live action film ‘The Garden’ (1968), a sober but less than subtle critique of social engineering that investigates the links in a human fence encircling a modest suburban home, and the unhinged comedy of ‘The Flat’ (also ’68) in which a Mack Sennet fall-guy experiences escalating levels of confusion and frustration as the fixtures and fittings of the world immediately around him exhibit nothing but treason.

With hindsight it is clear that Svankmajer’s increasingly bold satire of the Communist regime was likely to get him noticed by Party censors. It was an audaciousness that would culminate in the dispute over ‘Leonardo’s Diary’ in 1972. Conceived as an exercise in animation based on da Vinci’s copious notebooks, Svankmajer defied the authorities by intercutting shots of riot squads in full flight and collapsing buildings between hand-drawn studies of the beatific la Giaconda and trademark scenes of regurgitation and biological taxonomy. “It was criticised by the Central Committee of the Communist Party,” he says with a hint of pride, “And critics were appalled that such a film could represent Czechoslovakia at the Venice Film Festival.” But he claims the problem did not lie in the film itself. “There was always in-fighting amongst the highest functionaries of the Committee and it impacted on me and my film.” It is a vaguely disingenuous remark that hints at the mischief that leavens even his most contemplative films. The episode would see him banned from making his own films for seven years.

Returning to film after those years of exile during which he concentrated on producing a series of fine art projects with his wife Eva, Svankmajer completed his abandoned documentary ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (‘73/’79), in which some crackpot who uncannily resembles a young Kissinger minus his specs soap-boxes a lifelong theory that Walpole’s gothic novel was set in the heart of Bohemia rather than the heel of Italy. Then in 1982 he produced perhaps his best-known work, ‘Dimensions of Dialogue’. Somewhat better translated as ‘Possibilities of Dialogue’, it’s pairs of gushing heads disgorge reductive repetitions of Svankmajer’s unchecked worldview: that such possibilities are remote.

A move into feature films came with ‘Alice’ in 1987, which saw him take the bait of Lewis Carroll’s whacked-out meditation on childhood’s mobile swamp of memories and make it very much his own. A retelling of ‘Faust’ - that eternal alchemist - followed in ’94, but it was with the Promethean excesses of ‘Little Otik’, on the dutz of 2000, that all of his obsessions came to a demented nexus and found him purchase with the (left of) mainstream audience. A guilt-drenched exploration of the responsibility of creation and parenthood it follows an infertile couple who adopt a gnarly tree-stump and will it to life with Grimm consequences. “It is a rebellion against nature, it is a misuse of natural laws and that is something that has always fascinated me,” he admits. (He also recounts a bizarre tale in which islanders of Papua New Guinea to whom the film is screened believe it to be a documentary, which has our translator slapping her thigh like a Hogarthian gin queen)

Such ‘perversion’ is prevalent theme in his latest film, ‘Lunacy’. Shot through with Edgar Allan Poe’s bleak macabre and the radical licentiousness of de Sade, ‘Lunacy’ tells the tale of a troubled young man dispatched to the blue blazes of a crumbling netherworld lunatic asylum where the inmates may very well be the ones in charge. It is a troubling film, and one that espouses Svankmajer’s continued belief that surrealism, at it’s heart, is primarily a revolutionary movement that has the power to set the mind free. “The magic is real,” he assures me. “The magic is real.”