Image:Jan Svankmajer – Surviving LifeLEAD
If there’s room in your life for a bit of animated Czech psychoanalytic comedy then you could do worse than going to the Barbican’s short and sweet Jan Švankmajer season. With the likes of Tim Burton, The Brothers Quay and Terry Gilliam citing him as an influence, Švankmajer is certainly a surreal force to be reckoned with and his loopy, nightmarish yet highly amusing animations are fascinating.
Said psychoanalytic comedy comes in the form of Surviving Life; one of the director’s more gentle pieces and a good introduction to his work. It’s introduced by an animated version of Švankmajer, who apologises for using stop-motion animation instead of real actors in his film, only it was cheaper… This sets the scene for the delightful wacky, deadpan animation to follow. It screams Monty Python, although Švankmajer was of course there first.
His debut feature length animation, Alice trailer:
is a and demented adaptation of Carroll’s already off-the-wall tale is, much more than Surviving Life, demonstrative of Švankmajer’s penchant for an edgy world laden with menace. Little Otik dives right in to the dark side, with a childless couple taking a stump of wood as their stand-in baby with twistedly amusing repercussions.
On Little Otik’s release, Švankmajer wrote in the Guardian
about his terrifying experiences as a guinea pig for LSD and how this cemented his view of the subconscious as a potentially destructive and subversive force. Watching his films, it’s hard not to disagree. By manipulating the material world with a deeply creative and playful spark, Švankmajer not only gives life to the inanimate but also to the quirks and fears we otherwise try hard to bury.
Jan Švankmajer – The Directorspective
Barbican Film, 16th to 25th June
Part of Watch Me Move: The Animation Show
Passionate dialogue short
Meat Love short
