Jan Svankmajer

by Keith Leslie Johnson

Overview

Jan Svankmajer enjoys a curious sort of anti-reputation: he is famous for being obscure. Unapologetically surrealist, Svankmajer 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 Svankmajer'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 Svankmajer, 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, Svankmajer stands as the proponent of a biopolitical, ethical, and ecological outlook that implores us to reprogram our relationship with the vital matter all around us, including ourselves and our bodies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252083020
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	11/28/2017
Series:	Contemporary Film Directors
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Animist Cinema 1

Humiliation, or Object Life 10

On the Marionette Cinema 12

Anti-Illusion: Fantasy in G Minor and Et Cetera 20

Combinatorics: The Last Trick and Game with Stones 30

Tragedies without Actors: The Ossuary and Fall of the House of Usher 38

Wunderkammer, or Creaturely Life 47

Amateur Play: Historia naturae 51

Impersonal Play: Picnic with Weissmann 54

Child's Play: Down to the Cellar, Alice, and Little Otik 58

Haptics, or Animal Life 72

You Are What You Eat: Food 77

The Art of Conversation: Dimensions of Dialogue 81

Please Touch: Conspirators of Pleasure 86

Imagination, or Political Life 95

As Above, So Below: Faust 99

(Ab)normalization: The Flat, A Quiet Week in the House, and The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia 105

Absolute Freedom: Lunacy 113

Survival, or Ecological Life 118

Flat Ontology: Surviving Life 122

Ethical Misanthropy: Hmyz 132

Interviews with Jan Švankmajer 153

Filmography 165

Bibliography 177

Index 187

Editorial Reviews

"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."—Jonathan Eburne, author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime

From the Publisher