Week 2 (14th July 2017): Jan Svankmajer

Week 2: 14th July 2017

 

Jan Svankmajer

Jan Svankmajer is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media.He was born on the 4th of September 1934.He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his animation and features,which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam,the Brothers Quay,and many others.He is also well-known for a puppeteer, and an animator known for his dark reimaginings of wel-known fairy tales.He was hailed by critics for privileging visual elements over plot and narrative,others for his use of dark fantasy.

In the 1950's,Jan Svankmajer studied at the Institute of Industrial Arts and the Marionette Faculty of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts.After studying there,Jan Svankmajer started working as a theatre director with the Theatre of Masks and the Black Theatre as his associates.After getting involved with Prague's Lanterna Magika Theatre's mixed-media production,he started experimenting with film-making on his own.He started making his own short films in 1964,and has been continuing for over 20 years now after fulfilling his dream on making a film based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland called Alice(1987).

His well distinctive,uniquely as he calls it "Svankmajeresque",would do very well to get epithets bounded to be applied to him out of the way.Surrealist is one of them.It is a term used indiscriminately to refer a wide variety of artists and member of the Czech Surrealist movement,and has claimed his allegiance to that philosophy of art and life numerous of times.The other is animator,which is partially true.His films employ and with incomparable mastery,various techniques in his clay animation,puppetry,stop-motion,cut-out figures and the often mixed in with "live" subjects.These are just techniques that means to an end and it is a vier of the world,life and its dynamics.

In the mid-1970's,he has produce and exhibited his drawings,collages and 'tactile sculptures',after being temporarily banned from film-making by the Czech authorities.Some of his most famous work Lekce Faust (1993; Faust),gave a new spin to the familiar tale of the Faustian bargain.The film is set in a foreboding puppet theatre that lures the main characters inside.He experienced a strange version of the Faust play that includes giant puppets and clay figures filmed in stop-motion