Movie review • Six short animation movies by Jan Svankmajer

Svankmajer seeks to inscribe his works in a logic where the spectator would be confronted with an absurdity all the time. He also wants to create discomfort from images going in a direction diametrically opposed to those of our daily life. 

These six short films offer a fine overview of the art developed by Jan Svankmajer over the past forty years. The artist not only demonstrates great formal originality by mixing modern editing techniques with an approach to animation from the Czech puppeteer tradition, but he also develops recurring themes that are extremely powerful from a political point of view but also also philosophical. 

When discovering these films, it is not surprising to learn that they have influenced many renowned filmmakers, including Tim Burton, Henry Sellick, Darren Aronofsky or Milos Forman, who moreover described Svankmajer as the crossover between Walt Disney and Luis Buñuel !! Since 1983 and the Annecy Festival, Jan Svankmajer has enjoyed international notoriety in the animation world. These films are the subject of festivals around the world and during the 90s some TV channels like MTV were keen to broadcast their latest films between two U2 music videos!

The Apartment ( 1968, 13 minutes)

This black and white short film shot in 1968 features a man entering an apartment. Very quickly, this character is confronted with absurd situations: he tries to use a spoon with a hole to eat soup, tries to light a flooded boiler, breaks an egg-cup with an egg and lies down in a bed that self-destructs! Here Svankmajer is fully part of the surrealist movement by exhibiting objects whose function is no longer that attributed to them in everyday life. In this sense, the artist is similar to André Breton who declared to seek to 'hound the mad beast of function', or Meret Oppenheim to whom we owe 'The Luncheon in Fur' representing a cup, a saucer and a spoon unusable because made of animal fur. 

At the end of the short film, the man is naked (his clothes ripped when he brushed against the walls). Hagard, he sees a door that won't open. He then tries to destroy it and finds nothing other than a wall with hundreds of names engraved on it. Desperate, he writes his own ‘Josef ...’. This last event concludes the story on a note of resignation that can be seen as a critique of our society where materialism trumps the intellect. Of course, the point is less direct than in Manly Games, but seeing man, and by extension humanity, abdicate in front of objects, in other words society, naturally leads to this political analysis.

Et Cetera (1966, 7 minutes)

Produced in 1966, this animated short is broken down into three "articles". The first shows a man learning to use wings to fly between two chairs. The very sober drawings (the man is entirely black, his features are coarse and the background is white) show a character, each member of which seems cut out. We then think of a puppet to which animation gives movement, and therefore life.

The second part is a color watercolor where a man tries to train a wild animal with a whip. The very sketchy soundtrack only hints at the crack of the whip and this episode is also very sober. However, the sequence ends with a change of role as the animal takes the whip to train the man! Svankmajer thus demonstrates his constant interest in surrealist situations.

The last article describes a man drawing a house he tries to enter without success. Again, the animation is extremely basic. The interest of this episode still lies in the political interpretation that can be given to the images: the man cannot enter the house he created. After thinking about it, he grabs his pencil and draws his home around him. He has finally given birth to his dream but cannot get out of it. Here as in The Apartment, the objects push the man towards a situation of confinement ...

Darkness, Light, Darkness (1989, 8 minutes)

Short 8-minute film, the most disturbing of the series, Svankmajer features two animated clay hands locked in a doll's house. Regularly, there is a knock on the door and a new element of the human body bursts into the room. They are first eyes, which the hands do not know what to do with, ears uniting to form a butterfly, then a head to which they are grafted. Then come a real tongue and brain that fit into the clay composition. In the end, the body takes shape, a man is born, but, too big, he stays locked in the space of the dollhouse! 

What is shocking about this work is the way Svankmajer manipulates real organic matter. The use of a brain and an animal tongue in an animation of a clay sculpture creates discomfort: the blood and flesh mixed with a material reminiscent of the plasticine of our childhood provoke a contrast transforming the passive gaze of the average viewer with an active and critical gaze. We find this approach in eXistenZ (1999) by David Cronenberg where organic materials come to mingle with the childish world of video games.

The Possibilities of Dialogue (1982, 11,30 minutes)

This film which brought Svankmajer international notoriety is certainly the best of the six shorts proposed in this article. The images are of rare strength and mix objects taking a human form: the faces created devour each other to be then vomited and give birth to a new character, bodies of clay kiss and destroy each other and finally heads binoculars swallow all kinds of objects, each more incredible than the next ... These images obviously offer a multitude of artistic, political or psychological axes of analysis. But fundamentally, the most interesting element of this short is certainly its form and in particular the one that Svankmajer uses in the first part: motley objects are arranged to draw a face, thus evoking the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. This 15th century Italian Mannerist painter is known for his very avant-garde works where the characters are composed of fruits, vegetables or wild animals and it is no coincidence that the Surrealists so admired this artist who had known , long before the arrival of André Breton, diverting the use of objects and turning them into a work of art in its own right. with Svankmajer, the faces look astonishingly like those of Arcimboldo and come to life thanks to the animation born from a quick and precise editing. In the end, the result obtained seduces and creates surprise!

Manly Games (1988, 12 minutes)

A newspaper dedicated to the analysis of footbalistic headlines: 'Football makes stupid?'. For Svankmajer the answer is clear: YES! The film features a man installed in front of a match broadcast on the TV. The man is filmed in color while the television images are animated. Here, Svankmajer mixes several astonishing animation techniques: the footballers take the form of cardboard puppets or photographs of famous players to which he gives movement and therefore life through editing. But beyond this formal mastery, the interest of the film lies in its speech. Whether we like football or not, we have to admit that Svankmajer's words hit the mark: his protagonist is totally lobotomized, football players keep attacking each other and when one of them dies, opposing team is credited with a goal! Meanwhile, the beer bottles pile up in front of the hero's television ... Basically, Svankmajer does not seek to criticize football from a sporting or ethical point of view, his remarks are aimed more at the Czech society of Eighties when the government financed the big clubs of the country and multiplied the televised matches on the only television channel. Football was used to alienate the masses and, in a way, to contain all revolutionary inclinations ... In this sense, Manly games has a heavy content with meaning and is of obvious historical interest!

Historia Naturae (1967, 9 minutes)

A quick assembly on naturalistic boards gives birth to shells, butterflies or various insects. Between each species, a shot of a face swallowing meat appears. The man is described as a predator. The last plate filmed is that of the human species and, once again, the face ingests flesh, symbolizing the idea that man is a predator for man. Here we find certain cannibalistic obsessions of Svankmajer: as in The Possibilities of dialogue, man does not hesitate to feed on his own species after having devoured all of nature. Here there is no movement in space, just a succession of superimposed images. Svankmajer thus gives a sensation of vertigo to his film. Vertigo in the face of this situation facing humanity. Beyond the society that prevents man from thriving, the latter destroys his environment and his own species. If Svankmajer offers a very dark vision of human nature, his footage is thematically bright and extremely livel thanks to the remarkable animation film!