Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Animation
Jan Svankmajer studied sculpture, painting, engraving,
and the writings of the surrealist artists at the College of
Applied Arts in Prague in the early 1950s, eventually
entering the famed Prague Academy of Performing Arts in
1954 to study puppetry and filmmaking. These
multidisciplinary skills earned Svankmajer a place as
director and designer at the Czech State Puppet Theatre in
1958 and secured him work with the Semafor Mask
Theatre in 1960. His first films—Poslední trik pana
Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara (The Last Trick, 1964),
Hra s kameny (A Game with Stones, 1965), and
Rakvickarna (Punch and Judy, 1966)—demonstrate
Svankmajer’s trademark synthesis of the arts and the
particular relationship between animated puppets and
objects, human actors, and automata within performance
contexts and ‘‘psychological’’ spaces.
The most significant influence on Svankmajer is the
authoritarian context in which he worked. Following the
Prague Spring of 1968 and his implicit critique of
communism in Leonarduv denik (Leonardo’s Diary, 1972),
Svankmajer was banned from making animated films for
seven years. When permitted to return to filmmaking, he
agreed to make approved literary adaptations. His
interpretations of Hugh Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
(Otrantsky´ zámek, 1977) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of
the House of Usher (Zánik domu Usheru, 1981), are
nevertheless thematically similar to his later Poe adaptation,
Kyvadlo, jáma a nadeje (The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope,
1983) and his Lewis Carroll pieces, Zvahlav aneb Saticky
Slameného Huberta ( Jabberwocky, 1971) and the full-length
feature Neco z Alenky (Alice, 1988). All are strident surrealist
critiques of authoritarian regimes and political repression
using irrational images drawn from the unconscious.
Svankmajer’s bleak masterpiece, Moznosti dialogu
(Dimensions of Dialogue, 1982), was banned in
Czechoslovakia but enjoyed international success as a rich
metaphor about the failure of personal and political
communication. Do pivnice (Down to the Cellar, 1983)
the world’s first electronic programmable computer;
although it was a vast contraption, it had little processing
power. With the first silicon transistors, made in 1954,
JAN SVANKMAJER
b. Prague, Czechoslovakia, 4 September 1934
was an autobiographical interrogation of Svankmajer’s
childhood, depicting the terrors of unknown and mutable
objects in a dark cellar. Many saw a similarly frightening
engagement with childhood in Svankmajer’s Alice, which
sees Carroll’s Wonderland recast as a nightmare world of
disturbing images suggesting death, decay, and detritus,
propelled by unconscious and complex desires.
The eventual downfall of communism produced
Tma/Svetlo/Tma (Darkness/Light/Darkness, 1989), an
absurdist fable about human endurance in the light
of repression, and a short history of postwar
Czechoslovakia, The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia
(1990), which retains a chilling scepticism about
oppression even in the newly democratic state.
Svankmajer’ssubsequent features, Faust (1994), Spiklenci
slasti (Conspirators of Pleasure, 1996), and Otesánek (Little
Otik, 2000), combine live action and animation, yet
continue his preoccupations with the ‘‘life’’ within found
objects, the reconfiguration of ‘‘the body,’’ and the
surreal and subversive prompts of the unconscious.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
The Last Trick (1964), Leonardo’s Diary (1972), Dimensions of
Dialogue (1982), Alice (1988), Jídlo (Food, 1992),
Otesánek (Little Otik, 2000)
FURTHER READING
Field, Simon, Guy L’Eclair and Michael O’Pray, eds.
Afterimage 13: Animating the Fantastic. London:
Afterimage/British Film Institute, Autumn 1987.
Hames, Peter, ed. Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan
Svankmajer. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995.
Hosková, Simeona, and Kveta Otcovská, eds. Jan Svankmajer:
Transmutation of the Senses. Prague: Edice Detail, Central
Europe Gallery and Publishing House, 1994.
Pilling, Jane, ed. A Reader in Animation Studies. London:
John Libbey, 1997.
Svankmajer, Jan, and Eva Svankmajer. Animus Anima
Animation. Prague: Slovart Publishers and Arbor Vitae—
Foundation for Literature and Visual Arts, 1998.
Paul Wells
and integrated circuits in 1958, computers became more
powerful, and their uses more various but still largely
untouched by creative endeavors.
90 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM