Contemporary Film Directors: Jan Svankmajer (ePub)

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.|
Cover
Title
Contents
Acknowledgments
ANIMIST CINEMA
Humiliation, or Object Life
On the Marionette Cinema
Anti-Illusion: Fantasy in G Minor and Et Cetera
Combinatorics: The Last Trick and Game with Stones
Tragedies without Actors: The Ossuary and Fall of the House of Usher
Wunderkammer, or Creaturely Life
Amateur Play: Historia naturae
Impersonal Play: Picnic with Weissmann
Child's Play: Down to the Cellar, Alice, and Little Otik
Haptics, or Animal Life
You Are What You Eat: Food
The Art of Conversation: Dimensions of Dialogue
Please Touch: Conspirators of Pleasure
Imagination, or Political Life
As Above, So Below: Faust
(Ab)normalization: The Flat, A Quiet Week in the House, and The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia
Absolute Freedom: Lunacy
Survival, or Ecological Life
Flat Ontology: Surviving Life
Ethical Misanthropy: Hmyz
INTERVIEWS WITH JAN SVANKMAJER
Filmography
Bibliography
Index|Keith Leslie Johnson is lecturer of English and film and media studies at the College of William and Mary.