Jan Svankmajer

Although the art and films of Jan Švankmajer enjoy wide international recognition today, ranking him among the most original artists of the last decades, many aspects of his life and work have remained unexplored. Nor has any book yet tried to systematically and comprehensively mark out the path of the formation and development in the work of this film-maker, artist, experimenter, poet and 'militant Surrealist' and thus show how the different sides converse with each other. The present book is the most comprehensive monograph on Jan Švankmajer so far, it describes with greater depth and precision aspects of his life and work and it invites the reader to dive into a wonderfully rich and coherent, distinctive and unique universe. The essays emphasise and illuminate characteristic attributes of Švankmajer's work - puppet theatre, Mannerism, Surrealism, collaboration with Eva Švankmajerová, his own film idiom, and also comparatively little known elements such as obsessional passion for collecting, first formative years and experiences.

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.

Scientific Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Film Science, grade: N/A: Professional Lecture, University of Technology, Sydney (School of Design), course: MA Animation, language: English, abstract: This lecture ‘Revising Animation Genres: Jan Svankmajer, Tim Burton and James Cameron and the Study of Myth’ addresses the idea or concept of today’s classification of genres for animation feature films and interrogates why this concept needs to be revised today. The lecture is also about what makes it possible to tell a story successfully within films that use animation visual effects today. To do this, it discusses why the concept of the animation genre needs to be revised and suggests how today we need to look at the idea of genres in animation differently than we did in the past. By contrast with the modernism of the past (when fixed styles in art and culture had existed, making it possible to create certain strong recognisable frameworks for art which had helped us categorise different styles and genres and types of film and types of stories), today, a lot more art and art making is made up from a lot of pastiche, which now sees the appropriating of a mixture of ideas from other contexts, genres and themes. This appropriation of ideas previously not normally grouped together within an artwork or film or piece of animation is now being combined into an overall fraternizing of codes and references in films that often would employ animation visual effects.

Jan Aevankmajer wrote this remarkable book on tactile art when he stopped directing films after censorship by the Czechoslovakian government and experimented intensively with tactile phenomena and the creative imagination. Illustrated with over 100 images, the book is organised around many reproductions of Aevankmajer's wondrous tactile art objects, tactile poems, experiments and games. It also includes dialogues with, and artworks by, other collaborating artists from the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists. Aevankmajer also gathers together as contributors such notable exponents of tactual experience as Edgar Allen Poe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim, Ay-O, and F.T. Marinetti. Michael Havas, producer of some of Aevankmajer's films, says of the book: 'it is typically Aevankmajer: erudite and very consequential. Sometimes also very funny and erotic. Totally unique.'

Cartoons—both from the classic Hollywood era and from more contemporary feature films and television series—offer a rich field for detailed investigation and analysis. Contributors draw on theories and methodology from film, television, and media studies, art history and criticism, and feminism and gender studies.

Previous ed.: published as Dark alchemy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995.

The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation from the 1920s to the present, covering both 2D animation forms and CGI, with a focus upon the stop-motion films of Jirí Trnka, Hermína Týrlová, Jan Švankmajer and Jirí Barta. Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects. In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers. Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.

In this provocative collection of essays, a diverse selection of films are examined in terms of the relationship between cinema and the changing urban experience in Europe and the United States since the early 20th century.