Jan Švankmajer is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and many others.
Švankmajer has gained a reputation over several decades for his distinctive use of stop-motion technique, and his ability to make surreal, nightmarish, and yet somehow funny pictures. He continues to make films in Prague.
Švankmajer's trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses fast-motion sequences when people walk or interact. His movies often involve inanimate objects being brought to life through stop-motion. Many of his films also include clay objects in stop-motion, otherwise known as clay animation. Food is a favourite subject and medium.
Stop-motion features in most of his work, though recently his feature films have included much more live action sequences than animation.
Alice
Jan Svankmajer's first feature film - an adapation of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' may be the antidote for anyone who didn't like the Disney version. Then again, it might not. Stuffed white rabbits leaking sawdust, animated dolls and animal skulls, wind-up March Hares smearing butter on watches... Svankmajer's version may defy analysis, but embraces the surrealism of the original story without abandoning its basic narrative.
Many of his movies, like the short film Down to the Cellar, are made from a child's perspective, while at the same time often having a truly disturbing and even aggressive nature. In 1972 the communist authorities banned him from making films, and many of his later films were suppressed. He was almost unknown in the West until the early 1980s.Today Švankmajer is one of the most celebrated animators in the world.
Dimensions of dialogue, part1/2 and 3
Plot
The animation is divided into three sections. "Exhaustive discussion" shows Arcimboldo-like heads gradually reducing each other to bland copies; "Passionate discourse" shows a clay man and woman who dissolve into one another sexually, then quarrel and reduce themselves to a frenzied, boiling pulp; and "Factual conversation" consists of two elderly clay heads who extrude various objects on their tongues (toothbrush and toothpaste; shoe and shoelaces, etc.) and intertwine them in various combinations.
PS: This is my favourite short film of Svankmajer!! Mandatory to watch
