Life and career

Jan Švankmajer is a Czech animator and filmmaker born in Prague. An early influence on his later artistic development was a puppet theatre he was given for Christmas as a child. He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and later in the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. He contributed to Emil Radok's film Doktor Faust in 1958 and then began working for Prague's Semafor Theatre where he founded the Theatre of Masks. He then moved on to the Laterna Magika multimedia theatre, where he renewed his association with Radok. This theatrical experience is reflected in Švankmajer's first film The Last Trick, which was released in 1964. Under the influence of theoretician Vratislav Effenberger Švankmajer moved from the mannerism of his early work to classic surrealism, first manifested in his film The Garden (1968), and joined the Czechoslovakian Surrealist Group.

He was married to Eva Švankmajerová, an internationally known surrealist painter, ceramicist, and writer until her death in October 2005. Švankmajerová collaborated on several of her husband's movies, including Alice, Faust, and Otesánek. They had two children, Veronika (b. 1963) and Václav (b. 1975, an animator).

Švankmajer has gained a reputation over several decades for his distinctive use of stop-motion technique, and his ability to make surreal, nightmarish, and yet somehow funny pictures. He continues to make films in Prague.

Švankmajer's trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses fast-motion sequences when people walk or interact. His movies often involve inanimate objects being brought to life through stop-motion. Many of his films also include clay objects in stop-motion, otherwise known as claymation. Food is a favourite subject and medium. Švankmajer also uses pixilation in many of his films, including Food (1992) and Conspirators of Pleasure (1996).

Stop-motion features in most of his work, though recently his feature films have included much more live action sequences than animation.

Many of his movies, like the short film Down to the Cellar, are made from a child's perspective, while at the same time often having a truly disturbing and even aggressive nature. In 1972 the communist authorities banned him from making films, and many of his later films were suppressed. He was almost unknown in the West until the early 1980s. Writing in The New York Times, Andrew Johnston praised Svankmajer's artistry, stating "while his films are rife with cultural and scientific allusions, his unusual imagery possesses an accessibility that feels anchored in the shared language of the subconscious, making his films equally rewarding to the culturally hyperliterate and to those who simply enjoy visual stimulation."

Today Švankmajer is one of the most celebrated animators in the world. Among his best known works are the feature films Alice (1988), Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), Little Otik (2000) and Lunacy (2005), a surreal comic horror based on two works of Edgar Allan Poe and the life of Marquis de Sade. The two stories by Poe, "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" and "The Premature Burial", provide Lunacy its thematic focus, whereas the life of Marquis de Sade provides the film's blasphemy. Also famous (and much imitated) is the short Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time. His films have been called "as emotionally haunting as Kafka's stories." His latest film is Surviving Life from 2010.

His next project is called Insects (Hmyz). It has a projected budget of 40 million CZK and a preliminary release set for 2017. The film will be based on the play Pictures from the Insects' Life by Karel Čapek, which Švankmajer describes as following: "This Čapek´s play is a very misanthropic, and I always liked it — bugs behave as a human beings, and people behave as insects. It also reminds one a lot of Franz Kafka and his famous Metamorphosis."

On 27 July 2013 he received the Innovation & Creativity Prize by Circolino dei Films, an independent Italian cultural organization.

On 10 July 2014, he received the 2014 FIAF Award during a special ceremony of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Filmography

Feature-length films

Year	English title	Original title	Source material
1988	Alice	Něco z Alenky	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
1994	Faust	Lekce Faust	The Faust legend (including traditional Czech puppet show versions), Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Goethe's Faust.
1996	Conspirators of Pleasure	Spiklenci slasti	Original story
2000	Little Otik	Otesánek	Otesánek by Karel Jaromír Erben
2005	Lunacy	Šílení	"The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" and "The Premature Burial" by Edgar Allan Poe
2010	Surviving Life	Přežít svůj život	Original story
2018	Insects	Hmyz	Pictures from the Insects' Life by Karel Čapek and Josef Čapek

Short films

Year	English title	Original title	Notes
1964	The Last Trick	Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara
1965	Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasy in G minor	Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasia G-moll
1965	A Game with Stones	Spiel mit Steinen
1966	Punch and Judy	Rakvičkárna	Also known as The Coffin Factory and The Lych House
1966	Et Cetera
1967	Historia Naturae (Suita)
1968	The Garden	Zahrada
1968	The Flat	Byt	Available on the Little Otik DVD
1968	Picnic with Weissmann	Picknick mit Weissmann
1969	A Quiet Week in the House	Tichý týden v domě
1970	Don Juan	Don Šajn
1970	The Ossuary	Kostnice	About the Sedlec Ossuary
1971	Jabberwocky	Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta	Based on "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll
1972	Leonardo's Diary	Leonardův deník
1973-79	Castle of Otranto (film)	Otrantský zámek	Based on "The Castle of Otranto" by Horace Walpole
1980	The Fall of the House of Usher	Zánik domu Usherů	Based on "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe
1982	Dimensions of Dialogue	Možnosti dialogu
1983	Down to the Cellar	Do pivnice
1983	The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope	Kyvadlo, jáma a naděje	Based on "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe and "A Torture by Hope" by Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
1988	Virile Games	Mužné hry	Also known as The Male Game
1988	Another Kind of Love		Music video for Hugh Cornwell
1988	Meat Love	Zamilované maso
1989	Darkness/Light/Darkness	Tma, světlo, tma
1989	Flora
1989	Animated Self-Portraits		Portmanteau film by 27 filmmakers
1990	The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia	Konec stalinismu v Čechách
1992	Food	Jídlo

Animation and gadgets

Year	English title	Original title	Director
1978	Dinner for Adele	Adéla ještě nevečeřela	Oldřich Lipský
1981	The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians	Tajemství hradu v Karpatech	Oldřich Lipský
1982	Ferat Vampire	Upír z Feratu	Juraj Herz
1983	Visitors	Návštěvníci	Jindřich Polák
1984	Three Veterans	Tři veteráni	Oldřich Lipský

Books

• Jan Švankmajer, Touching and Imagining: An Introduction to Tactile Art, I.B.Tauris, 2014, 9781780761473.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]