Jan Švankmajer
Introduction
In one of his articles, Vratislav Effenberger, Chech poet, notes that Švankmajer’s films had not only acquired a following of enthusiasts, but also reached critics and audiences on a much broader front, most of whom would be unlikely to share his surrealist perspectives. (The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, 2008)
This is one of the reasons why I chose to write about this filmmaker. None of the less, I remember that I saw one of his films in cinema (don’t really remember name of the film), not even a year ago and right there, on the spot, I felt in love with his masterpieces. They are truthfully breathtaking and full of mysticism. I loved and still love the way he plays around with his puppets in films – he is absolutely fearless, experimenting with everything you can possibly imagine. So with this kind of thoughts I thought that I definitely have to make some kind of research and get as much information about his films and biography as possible. I have read so many reviews from film critics that I must say – they got me so confused that I could not understand who Jan Švankmajer is and what are his films about. But still, I was quite surprised, how positive everyone was about his work. And I must admit, that this is the key reason why I chose to write about this animator.
Czechoslovakia
Antonim Liehim once describer Czechoslovakia as one of the chief European centres for modernism and the avant-garde (1980: 134). Given the political divisions of the post-war world, it is not surprising that the Czech and Slovak contributions to twentieth-century art and design are only now being rediscovered. In recent years exhibitions in Houston, London, Valencia and Prague itself have brought ‘Czech Modernism’ back into focus. (Central European Avant-gardes, 2002)
As well, Czechoslovakia has one of the longest film histories, dating from 1898 when Jan Kŗiženecky began to make films, thus becoming the first film producer in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Biography
One of the great Czech filmmakers, Jan Švankmajer, 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 Švankmajerova, and the late Vratislav Effenberger, the leading theoretician of the Czech Surrealist Group, which Švankmajer joined and of which he still remains a member. (jansvankamajer.com 01.05)
What else is important - the surrealist movement, of which Jan Švankmajer is a leading contemporary exponent, moved from its position as the prime avant-garde movement of the 1930’s to a subterranean existence that has clearly infected the emphases of his own work. (The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, 2008). That as well is not a surprise. While I was making a research for this essay found a lot of looping in information from film critics, they were saying: ,His films are full of avant-gardism, surrealism and ‘poetism’.’(imdb.com 01.05)
So I started to think – what is avant-garde film? Avant-garde is also used, for the films shots in the twenties in the field of history’s avant-gardes currents in France or Germany, to describe this work, and underground has been used in the sixties, though it has also had other connotations. (imdb.com 01.05) As well, talking with my friends about film industry nowadays, we started discussion - How is avant-garde film called today? And answer was – Experimental film. How come? Years ago, when experimental film was still called Avant-garde film, filmmakers were more open minded, more independent and fearless than commercial filmmakers, which explains all those definitions.
I consider, those are the actual keywords for Švankmajer’s films – experimental, independent and fearless. As well you can see even a growth of experimentalism in every following film of his. It is almost like he is painless for critics and he just does not care about – more crazy it get’s – even better.
His filmography and the ideas
From Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel to Walerian Borowczyk, from the Quay Brothers to David Lynch, all the grand masters of surrealism began their cinematic careers making experimental mini-films, and Jan Švankmajer is no exception. Prague's most influential surrealist since Franz Kafka may now be best known for absurdist mixed-media features such as Alice (1988)(see figure 1), Faust (1994), Conspirators Of Pleasure (1996), Little Otik (2000) and the recent Lunacy (2005) - but between 1964 and 1992 he also made 26 short films, ranging in length from 30 seconds (Flora, 1989) to 31 minutes (Don Juan, 1969). All of these, as well as two-and-a-half hours of extra materials, have been collected in a new, immaculately compiled three-disc retrospective from BFI. (The Age of Gold, 2003)
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Figure1: Key moment from Jan Svankmajers film Alice (1988) [imdb.com 27.04]
In fact, long before he discovered the expressive potential of cinema, Švankmajer had worked as a marionette artist in various Czech theatres, and this early experience in puppetry pervades his subsequent films. For not only do they employ, alongside their live action, an array of animation techniques - marionettes, stop motion, hand-drawn cartoons, ‘claymation’, cut-outs, re-edited archive footage, insane collages and dizzyingly rapid montages - they also show an obsessive thematic concern with the interplay between the spiritual and the material, the animate and the inanimate - so perfectly embodied by the figure of the marionette, made of dead wood yet magically invested with life by the artist.
The two pieces that draw most explicitly on Švankmajer’s marionette years are Punch and Judy (1966) and Don Juan. Both films feature traditional wooden puppets (with strings, and sometimes even the puppeteers' hands, unconcealed), but the first film has a live guinea pig interacting with its animated antagonists, while the action of the latter spills out from a stylised stage to its backstage areas, and then beyond to the outside world. The marionettes in both films defy conventional death, repeatedly escaping their coffins or returning as ghosts, and yet they are also, quite literally, deconstructed before our eyes as their parts end up violently severed, in a dark celebration of both the spiritual endurance and material fragility of 'life'. (The Age of Gold, 2003)
Other films in the collection further explore the relationship between people and objects. At one extreme, there are the all-live films which, without once resorting to animation, still reduce their human 'characters' to objects with merely functional or aesthetic qualities. So in The Garden (1968) a group of meekly compromised individuals submits without complaint to its assigned role as 'human fence' for a rural farm; while The Ossuary (1970) documents the chapel near Kutná Hora where thousands upon thousands of human bones have been transformed over many centuries into giant sculptures and macabre tableaux – with layers of graffiti still being added today.
At the other extreme, there are the films in which objects are shown at play in the absence of any 'characters' - although even here, the human form is never far away. In JS Bach - Fantasy in G Minor (1965), a dusty building's bricks, wires, fittings and cracks are shown dancing in sympathy to an organ piece, whose player is glimpsed only briefly at the beginning of the film. In A Game with Stones (1965), rocks poured out by a strange clockwork device march and swirl in elaborate patterns that culminate in mosaic faces - before they destroy the very machine that has spawned them. In Jabberwocky (1971), children's toys run riot under the gaze of a portrait of Lewis Carroll. The Fall of the House of Usher (1980) uses voice-over narration, animated landscapes and haunting mood to conjure up the (unseen) presence of Poe's characters. In Meat Love (1988), two slices of meat engage in a fleshy courtship (a forerunner of the carnal interstices found in Lunacy) before a fork tosses them together into the frying pan. (The Age of Gold, 2003)
Most of the films, however, fall somewhere in between, showing humans and objects in unexpected, at times unnerving configurations. In The Flat (1968), Picnic With Weissmann (1968), A Quiet Week In The House (1969) and Down To The Cellar (1983), domestic furnishings rebel, with varying degrees of humour and terror, against their human 'masters', instantiating their anxieties and fears in the most banally concrete of forms. In The Castle of Otranto (1979), an enthused archaeologist (Jaroslav Vozáb) attempts to excavate the supposed truths underlying Horace Walpole's fanciful Gothic novel even as the antiquated illustrations in a Czech edition of the book come to life. In Leonardo's Diary (1972), animated versions of Da Vinci's sketches are rapidly intercut with found documentary footage in a series of visual matches that suggest we may all be an extension of the Renaissance man's creative genius. And in Virile Games (1988) a football fanatic drifts into a beer-fuelled, sadomasochistic fantasy in which players - all bearing his distinctive moustache - murder each other using items found in his apartment. (The Age of Gold, 2003)
It is hardly surprising that Švankmajer’s work should have been regarded with suspicion, and has at times been suppressed or even banned by the Communist authorities. Against the Marxist conception of human history as a natural evolution towards the socialist ideal, Švankmajer prefers to portray evolution as a futile process leading at best to endless circularity and at worst to terminal self-destruction - principles well illustrated by A Game With Stones (1965), Et Cetera (1966), Historia Naturae, Suita (1967), Darkness-Light-Darkness (1989) and Food (1992), in all of which apparent progress proves to be illusory.
Even The Death of Stalinism In Bohemia (1990), Švankmajer’s self-styled 'work of agitprop', marking the welcome arrival of the Velvet Revolution, looks to the post- Stalinist future with as much dread as relief. And against the Communist adherence to the revolutionary power of dialectic, in films such as The Last Trick (1964), Punch And Judy (1966), Another Kind of Love (1988), Food (1992) and above all Dimensions of Dialogue (1982)(See Figure 2 and 3), Švankmajer suggests that true dialogue between individuals is a self-defeating impossibility. (The Age of Gold, 2003)
Figure 2: Key moment from Dimensions of Dialogue by Jan Švankmajer(1982) [thecompleteshorts.com 27.04]
Figure 3: Key moment from Dimensions of Dialogue by Jan Švankmajer(1982) [thecompleteshorts.com 27.04]
Add to this the barely disguised critique of oppression and tyranny in The Garden (1968) and The Pendulum, The Pit and Hope (1983), and you have the kind of material that is unlikely to please any totalitarian regime. Most importantly of all, though, Švankmajer’s defiantly irrational negativism was directly at odds with the rational positivism espoused within Communism. The animator brings to full life precisely what his rulers were endeavouring to keep repressed: the nightmarish, the unconscious, the nonsensical, the abject, the uncanny, the insatiable, the immoderate, and the ecstatic. This is cinema of quietly determined, barely licit resistance, and it hardly seems a coincidence that shortly after the Communists were removed from power, Švankmajer’s own interest in short films came to an end.
While Švankmajer’s vision may at times be pessimistic, bleak and disturbing (Flora manages to push all these buttons in its economic half-minute duration), it is also playful, irreverent and devilishly funny, as is perhaps best emblematised by his favourite image - recurring through many of these short films - of a tongue poking out. (The Age of Gold, 2003)
Puppets in the Feature Films
In Jan Švankmajer’s hierarchy in which ‘real’ people are situated in the real world, puppets are largely confined to the dream world or constructed as ‘objects as desire’, and objects, which often play, ‘starring roles’ in his short films, are demoted to a more contextual role. In exploring the ways in which these levels interact, it becomes apparent that Švankmajer’s use of puppets plays a key role in the structuring of the narratives. As once he said, he often takes refuge in his puppets, a world in which he feels secure. (The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, 2008)
A great example is Don Juan by Jan Švankmajer. It is the most conventional of his puppet films. A version of the traditional puppet plat, it’s figures were copied from the eighteenth – century originals. Švankmajer also researched the diction used in the original and encouraged his actors to use it. On this level, the film is as authentic as possible. On other levels, however, it is not. The actors move freely from stage to street and to constructed tableaux without asserting a uniform or dominant reality. This film also disrupts the course of the narrative by revealing the mechanics of manipulation and my intercutting close-ups of the play’s written text.
But there are significant differences between the use of puppets in Don Juan and in Jan Švankmajer’s later full-length films. Firstly, we are presented with a play in which the central identities are not disrupted, the story has consistent narrative line, and the film is frequently constructed as if watching a stage. The interaction between characters is often unconstrained by the fragmentations of montage. The audience is encouraged to identify with the characters but also experiences the eeriness that comes from seeing the puppets on stage. Unusually for Švankmajer, lightning, camerawork and editing combine to provide the film with an aesthetic appeal – an effect considerably enhanced by Zdenēk Liška’s music. The films can be seen as both tragic as lyrical. If compared with his later work, those draw attention to the almost puritanical avoidance of conventional aesthetics in his feature films. This was no doubt influenced by his joining the Surrealist Group and the impact of surrealist ideas. (The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, 2008)
Conclusion
This has been quite a journey. Now I clearly know more about Jan Švankmajer. I must admit - he is amazing director and filmmaker. His ideas are clear and unrepeatable. But definitely – I can see that we have something similar. Same way as he – I am trying to unite narrative and surreal in same concept. It is quite a struggle for me, but he is so experienced that all of his films are brilliant and concepts are clear as crystal. As well his way of thinking is unique, how he can use puppet stop-motion, claymation and live action in the same film. The most mystical part is that all of those experiments in one film still look smooth, almost like pure live action.
But, I must admit, as most of artists from Europe, you can feel that European breath in his films, he is trying to stand out from other film makers, and he is doing well. Most of European artists not always can succeed such a good quality of their artworks even after 50 years of experience.
I think the best way how to finish this essay, would be with Jan Švankmajers words:
“I never call myself an animated filmmaker because I am interested not in animation techniques or creating a complete illusion, but in bringing life to everyday objects.”
Jan Švankmajer (mubi.com 30.04)
Bibliography
Books:
Benson, Timothy O. (2002) Central European Avant-Gardes Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Hames, Peter (2008) Dark Alchemy: The Cinema by Jan Švankmajer, Second Edition. London: Wallflower Press
Short, Robert (2003) The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema. London: Creation Books
Internet resources:
www.imdb.com (01.05.11)
www.jansvankmajer.com (01.05.11)
www.mubi.com (30.04.11)
www.thecompleteshorts.com (27.04.11)
