One of the great Czech filmmakers, is an animator extraordinaire, Jan Svankmajer has been making intensely bizarre films since the mid-'60s. He became involved in the Theater of Masks and the famous Black Theater, before entering the Laterna Magika Puppet Theater where he first encountered film.
Svankmajer made his first film in 1964 and for over thirty years has made some of the most memorable and unique animated films ever made, gaining a reputation as one of the world’s foremost animators, and influencing filmmakers from Tim Burton to The Brothers Quay.
Most of his work is a mix between 3-D stop-motion animation, puppets and live-action, but it can involve any mix of the above. His stories are eerie, delightful, and surreal. His actors include real people, machines, socks, clay figures, antique dolls, pencil sharpeners, and skeletons or stuffed corpses of animals, among other things. His sets are usually decaying Czech buildings or landscapes, decorated with waste of the industrial age: rotting furniture, rusty nails, sawdust, oily screws, and the like.
Svankmajer’s short films are among his most brilliant and unsettling creations, combining surreal juxtapositions of human and clay figures, kitchen utensils, fruit, marionettes and more, to create a Kafkaesque world of blind alleys, locked rooms and childhood terrors.
Other videos:
Jan Svankmajer - Food Pt:1 (1992)
Jan Svankmajer - Meat Love (1989)
Jan Svankmajer - Dimensions of Dialogue Pt:1
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