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Jan Svankmajer (1934 - ) Date of Birth: 4 September 1934 Date of Death: Also Known As: BIOGRAPHY Jan Svankmajer was born in Prague on 4 September 1934 to a window-dresser father and dressmaker mother. At the age of eight, he was given a puppet theatre for Christmas, giving birth to a love of puppetry and fantasy that would stand him in good stead in later life. In 1950, Svankmajer enrolled at the Institute of Applied Arts in Prague where a classmate presented him with a copy of the book A World That Smells by Karel Teige, the founder of the Czech Surrealist Group. It was Svankmajer's introduction to surrealism which sparked and interest fuelled by his subsequent discovery of the work of Salvador Dalí. After completing his studies at the Institute, Svankmajer moved on to the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, joining the Department of Puppetry to study the art of puppetry as well as stage direction and set design. There, he discovered the joys of Soviet avant-garde cinema, leading to a prolonged study of such master surrealists as Luis Buñuel, Max Ernst, Dalí and Joan Miró. To graduate from the Academy, Svankmajer needed to stage a production.
He chose to adapt King Stag by Carlo Gozzi, using the same combination
of puppetry and live actors that would recur in many of his early film
works. Svankmajer's budding artistic career was briefly curtailed when he was forced to take part in compulsory military service, which he served at Marianske Lazne, though art and design were never far from his mind. On returning to civilian life, Svankmajer founded the Theatre of Masks under the umbrella of the Semafor Theatre in Prague. The company, which included Svankmajer's future wife Eva, was a busy one, staging many plays over the next couple of years. In 1962, Svankmajer held his first exhibition of drawings and gouaches in the corridors of the Semafor Theatre and on the strength of his work, he was invited by painter Vlastimil Benes and sculptor Zbynek Sekal to join the prestigious Maj group. But the Theatre of Masks was forced to move on in 1962 when Svankmajer fell out with the people running the Semafor Theatre and the group relocated to the famous Laterna Magika Theatre in Prague. While the company continued to stage well-received and challenging works, Svankmajer and Emil Radok tried unsuccessfully to collaborate on scripts for films that would eventually never get made. But film was the obvious next step for Svankmajer and in 1964, following the birth of his daughter Veronika the previous year, Svankmajer took the plunge. He left the Laterna Magika behind and, with the help of Eva and other members of the Black Theatre, made his debut short, Cislice (1960). Even as early as this, many of the images and obsessions that would inform Svankmajer's work throughout his career, were all present and correct. The success of Cislice seemed to spur Svankmajer on and he was soon turning out a regular stream of award winning, intellectually stimulating and haunting short films that were scooping up awards wherever they were shown. Not even the events of the Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion seemed to stem Svankmajer's creativity as he continued making films even in the most difficult of circumstances. In 1970, he met writer Vratislav Effenberger, a prominent member of the Czech Surrealist Group which he eagerly joined, remaining an active member ever since. It was an important step in Svankmajers personal and professional development, opening his eyes to the true power and potential of surrealism. That same year, Svankmajer got his first taste of censorship when the authorities took a dislike to his film Kostnice / The Ossuary. They demanded the removal of a tour guide's commentary, thus robbing it of much of Svankmajer's original intent. It remains, in its altered form, one of Svankmajer's least effective shorts. Svankmajer had long been an admirer of the works of Lewis Carroll, identifying closely with the author, and in 1971, he made Zvahlav aneb Saticky Slameného Huberta / Jabberwocky, which is as bizarre an "adaptation" (in its loosest sense) of Carroll's work as you'll ever see. Perhaps due to its Carroll connections, it became the first of Svankmajer's films to get international distribution. But the censorship that had so damaged Kostnice was to rear its ugly head again in 1972 when the short Leonarduv deník / Leonardo's Diary so incensed the Czech authorities with its unscripted and unflattering glimpses of Czech life that they banned him from making films for seven years. It was a terrible shock for Svankmajer but he refused to give up his burgeoning career in film and found work designing effects and title sequences at the Barrandov Film Studio. He also worked at his non-film art, creating in 1974 the first of his "tactile experiments", pieces of art that are expressly designed to be touched and felt. In 1979, Svankmajer was allowed to return to film-making, but only if he promised to restrict his efforts to literary classics. Naturally, he wasn't going to make literary adaptions as anyone else might. 1980s Zánik domu Usheru / The Fall of the House of Usher has more to do with his own tactile experiments for example than it does with Poe. But trouble wasn't far away. Moznosti dialogu / Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) won plenty of awards at festivals around the world but again earned the wrath of the Czech authorities. The film was paraded before the ideology commission of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party who dismissed it as the sort of subversive film-making they were trying to stamp out and promptly banned it. Unwanted at home, Svankmajer was forced to temporarily relocate to Slovakia to film Do pivnice / Down to the Cellar (1983). It would not be the last time that Svankmajer would seek financing and production facilities beyond the Czech borders. By now, the appeal of short films was beginning to wane a little and Svankmajer's thoughts were turning to a feature film. And what better source than Lewis Carroll. The result was the magnificent Neco z Alenky / Alice (1988), proving that his singular vision would be just as at home in the longer form as it had in the shorts. It was the first of his films to be given a full release in the States and it picked up a sizeable and loyal cult following that prompted a re-appraisal of his earlier work in the West. That same year, he also made his only music video, a short piece to accompany the song Another Kind of Love by former Stranglers singer Hugh Cornwell. The Cornwell gig led to two micro-shorts for MTV in 1989, Meat Love and Flora, before Svankmajer returned to short films with the brilliant and award winning Tma/Svetlo/Tma / Darkness/Light/Darkness, made and released as the Czech Communist regime collapsed during the Velvet Revolution. The events of the 1989 inspired Svankmajer to make his only political film to date, the scathing satire The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia, made in the UK for the BBC. In 1991, Svankmajer and long-time producer Jaromir Kallista buy an old cinema in the village of Knoviz and convert it into the Athanor studios which Svankmajer sees as the perfect opportunity to help stimulate Czech film production in the immediate post-Communist era. 1993 saw the release of Svankmajer's second feature, Faust. The film's troubled shoot (one crew-member committed suicide, another attempted to kill himself, the production's camera was destroyed and the team learnt that leading man Petr Cepek was terminally ill) seems to have had a detrimental effect and although it's still a marvellous film, it lacks the qualities that made Neco z Alenky / Alice such a masterpiece. A third feature, Spiklenci slasti / Conspirators of Pleasure followed in 1996, with Otesánek / Little Otik appearing in 2000 and Sílení in 2005. Throughout his long career, Svankmajer has created some of the most memorable, baffling, brilliant and infuriating films ever. At his worst, he can be dull and obtuse. But at his best, he's capable of creating dazzling images, welded to provocative narratives, that seem to burn themselves into the long-term memory. Films like Moznosti dialogu / Dimensions of Dialogue, Do pivnice / Down to the Cellar, Muzné hry / Virile Games (1988), Neco z Alenky / Alice (1988), Tma/Svetlo/Tma / Darkness/Light/Darkness and so many others are the sort of productions that really are difficult to forget. That Svankmajer's work isn't as well known as it should be is probably
down to their "difficult" nature. But for anyone with a taste
for the strange, the challenging and the grotesquely beautiful should
find much to enjoy in his impressive oeuvre. GENRE FILMOGRAPHY * = television 1958 1960 1964 1965 J.S.
Bach: Fantasia G-moll (script, director, production designer) 1966 Rakvickarna
(script, director, production designer) 1967 1968 Picknick
mit Weissmann (script, director, animator, production designer) Zahrada
(script, director) 1969 1970 Kostnice
(script, director, production designer) 1971 1972 1977 Otrantský
zámek (script, director, production designer) 1978 1981 Tajemství
hradu v Karpatech (special props designer) Upir z Feratu (title designer) Zánik
domu Usheru (script, director, animator, production designer) 1982 1983 Kyvadlo,
jáma a nadeje (script, director, production designer) Tri veterani
(animator) 1988 Muzné hry
(script, director, production designer) Neco z Alenky
(script, director) L'ours
(dream sequence animation) 1989 Flora (script, director, production designer) Meat Love
(script, director, production designer) Tma/Svetlo/Tma
(script, director, production designer) 1990 The
Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (script, director, production
designer) Dogs Walk, Fish Swim and the Baron Jumps Over the Moon (performer (himself)) * 1992 1994 1995 1996 2000 2005 REFERENCES REFERENCES 24 Images no.88 / 89 (Autumn / Winter 1997) pp.60-63;
64-68, 70-71 (Canada) Afterimage no.13 (Autumn 1987) pp.10-21; 22-32; 33-37
(UK) Animato no.38 (Summer / Autumn 1997) pp.20-24 (USA) Banc-Titre no.1/2 (March 1978) p.17 (France) Cine-Bulles 20 n1 (2002): 44-48 (France) Cinefantastique vol.26 no.3 (April 1995) pp.54-57
(USA) Cineforum vol.40 no.393 (April 2000) pp.67-68 (Italy) Film a Doba no.10 (1984) pp.593-559 (Czechoslovakia) Filmvilag vol.40 no.5 (1997) pp.12-15; 14-15 (Hungary) Image et Son/Ecran February 1967 pp.6-7 (France) Image et Son no.210 (November 1967) p.28 (France) Image et Son no.329 (June 1978) p.15 (France) Index on Censorship vol.24 no.6 (November / December
1995) pp.123-125 (UK) Kinema no.2 (Spring 1994) pp.30-41 (Canada) Kinetoscopio vol.10 no.50 (1999) pp.29-33 (Spain) Kino vol.31 no.9 (September 1997) pp.8-12 (Poland) Kino vol.36 no.4 (April 2002) pp.20-22; 23, 56 (Poland) Monthly Film Bulletin vol.53 no.630 (July 1986) pp.218-219;
224 (UK) Plateau vol.15 no.2 (1994) pp.16-18 (Belgium) Positif no.224 (November 1979) pp.59-59 (France) Positif no.297 (November 1985) pp.38-43 (France) Positif no.502 (December 2002) pp.97-99 (France) Positif no.508 (June 2003) pp.86-90 (France) Segnocinema vol.17 no.85 (May / June 1997) pp.67-69
(Italy) Sight and Sound vol.4 no.9 (September 1994) pp.20-23
(UK) Sight and Sound vol.11 no.10 (October 2001) pp.26-28;
28 (UK) Time Out no.1032 (30 May 1990) p.43 (UK) Transcript vol.2 no.3 (1997) pp.55-64 (UK) Variety no.367 (9-15 June 1997) p.40 (USA) The Village Voice vol.46 (10 July 2001) p.113 (USA)
Last Updated: 20 December, 2009
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