Clay rabbits
When I discovered the Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, my journey through the wonderland that Lewis Carroll had drawn in my subconscious when I was a child, changed forever. Then, the tea cups flew through the mental airs and watches, in the hands of greedy white rabbits looking for inexistent times, backed out, leaving the predictable future made by vaguely alienated timers, to open doors that had never been there but always were. When opened, a sugar cube was dissolved in a bitterly film coffee.
Jan Svankmajer is a marvel or maybe an everlasting question, depending on the eye of the beholder. Sculptor, filmmaker, designer and poet, master of stop-motion and clay figures, director of actors and skeletons of animals, his world seems not to be ours, but once inside, we noticed we all were born in it, as well as Jan Švankmajer did. Hra s kameny (1965), Rakvičkárna (1966), Et Cetera (1966), Historia Naturae (1967), Zahrada (1968), Picknick mit Weissmann (1968), Byt (1968), Kostnice (1970) or the more recent ones Něco z Alenky ("Alice", 1988) and the last Přežít svůj život (teorie a praxe) (2010), are brimming with talent, both in animation and in working with real actors.
He enjoys a high reputation while he’s working on his next project, an ambitious film under the working title Insects (Hmyz) based on the play Pictures from the life of insects written by another Czech author, Karel Capek, who died in 1938. Combination of two such disparate talents can be a seductive exercise for the viewer. Švankmajer refers to the project saying“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”.
While we await the arrival of that ambitious project, in his latest work, the film Surviving life (Přežít svůj Zivot (Praxair theory)) (2010), Švankmajer used photo cuts animation interacting with real actors. The film is about a married man who lives a double life in a dream in which he meets another woman. The film was awarded at the 67th Mostra de Venezia.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos by Jan Svankmajer