Jan Švankmajer

Contemporary Film Directors

by Keith Leslie Johnson

Jan Švankmajer enjoys a curious sort of anti-reputation: he is famous for being obscure. Unapologetically surrealist, Švankmajer draws on the traditions and techniques of stop-motion animation, collage, montage, puppetry, and clay to craft bizarre filmscapes. If these creative choices are off-putting to some, they have nonetheless won the Czech filmmaker recognition as a visionary animator.

Keith Leslie Johnson explores Švankmajer's work as a cinema that spawns new and weird life forms—hybrids of machine, animal, and non-organic materials like stone and dust. Johnson's ambitious approach unlocks access to the director's world, a place governed by a single, uncanny order of being where all things are at once animated and inert. For Švankmajer, everything is at stake in every aspect of life, whether that life takes the form of an object, creature, or human. Sexuality, social bonds, religious longings—all get recapitulated on the stage of inanimate things. In Johnson's view, Švankmajer implores us to reprogram our relationship with the vital matter all around us, including ourselves and our bodies.

210 pages, Hardcover

Published November 28, 2017

About the author

Keith Leslie Johnson is a lecturer of English and film and media studies at the College of William and Mary.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderful book—theoretically savvy, well-read/well-viewed in the Surrealist tradition, expansive, lucid, compelling, smart—brings the reader quite deeply into Svankmajer’s work while leaving the mystery at the heart of it very much intact. Usually, I am rather skeptical/weary of the Post-Humanist tropes, but here I found them apropos, convincing, and really helpful, the films lending them a unique immediacy. After sort of consigning my passion for Svankmajer to the old grad student days, Johnson’s book made me eager to go back through the whole oeuvre again with new eyes: a terrific read, very enthusiastically recommended. ((And for someone coming to the films for the first time, a splendid introduction as well)).

[Jonathan Eburne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I blurbed this book for the press--with pleasure--so will simply cite my blurb here. "Keith Johnson’s Jan Švankmajer is a triumph: a bold, synoptic, and elegantly written conceptual survey that brings fully to life the animating ideas of the Czech surrealist artist-filmmaker. Attending to the work of animation as a philosophy of life rather than an aesthetic technique alone, Johnson’s book lucidly presents Švankmajer’s art as the bearer of 'a vital, emergent, biopolitical, ethical, and ecological outlook.' Featuring detailed analyses of the artist’s full body of cinematic, artistic, and curatorial work, as well as an illuminating set of interviews, Jan Švankmajer presents the Czech artist in vital, living color."

[Balso · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superlative study. Thoroughly researched and exquisitely written. It’s hard to imagine another survey of Švankmajer’s work even coming close.