Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer

by Peter Hames (Editor)

Czech animator Jan Svankmajer is one of the most distinctive and influential of contemporary filmmakers. As a leading member of the Prague Surrealist Group, his work is linked to a rich avant-garde tradition and an uncompromising moral stance that brought frequent tensions with the authorities in the normalization years following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Svankmajer's formative influences have been the pre-war surrealists, the Prague of Rudolf II, experimental theatre, folk puppetry and, above all, the political traumas of the past 50 years. Like his contemporaries--including playwright president Vaclav Havel, and, in exile, novelist Milan Kundera and filmmaker Milos Forman--Svankmajer's dominant life experiences have been the realities of the Stalinist system, both the explicit state terror of the 1950s and the Brezhnevist neo-Stalinism of the 1970s and the 1980s.

After training in puppetry and working in the Prague theatre, he made his first film in 1964. He directed a number of important films in the 1960s, including the live-action and Kafkaesque "Byt" ("The Flat," 1968) and "Zahrada" ("The Garden," 1968) and consolidated his international reputation with "Moznosti dialogu" ("Dimensions of Dialogue") in 1982. Since then, he has continued his highly visual and poetic approach in two feature-length films, "Neco z Alenky" ("Alice," 1987) and "Lekce Faust" ("Faust," 1994). As a filmmaker, Svankmajer is constantly exploring and analyzing his concern with power, fear and anxiety, confrontation and destruction, magic, the irrational and the absurd, and displays a bleak outlook on the possibilities for dialogue. In challenging accepted narrative, the bourgeoisie of realism (nezval), and the thematic and formal conventions of the mainstream media, Svankmajer's work is startlingly dynamic, subversive, and confrontational.

Genres: Film, Art

223 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 1995

About the author

Peter Hames is Honorary Research Associate in Film and Media Studies at Staffordshire University. His books include The Czechoslovak New WaveDark Alchemy: The FIlms of Jan Svankmajer.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a series of essays dealing with Czech stop-motion surrealist Jan Svankmajer, now in his 70s and still a prominent creative force. Since the parts are independent of one another, I'd jump straight to the central interview with Svankmajer himself, and then move on to whichever parts interest you. I found the opening history of Czech surrealism and avant-garde film particularly useful, and it has set me onto seeking out much more of Czech New Wave in general.

Here's a bit from the interview, which seems particularly germane, not only to viewing Svankmajer, but in dealing with anyone whose work dredges up dreams and cryptic desires (say, Murakami and Lynch):

The essence of my creative work is an internal model which is shaped by both conscious and unconscious elements. The impulse coming from the world around (from reality) is treated in the unconscious boiler of an internal laboratory to which I have no access. Inspiration is, then, the doorbell to the door of a house which tells me that the internal model is ready and that I can come up and collect it. During the course of this process, the pre-product emerges into the conscious several times to form further reality impulses so that it may once more submerge itself below the surface back to the subconscious where it carries on its work. I cannot control the rhythm of this process until the moment when that little bell rings.