The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer PDF Download

Author: Peter Hames
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

View

Book Description
Previous ed.: published as Dark alchemy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995.

Author: Peter Hames
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232

View

Book Description
Czech animator Jan Svankmajer is one of the most distinctive and influential of contemporary filmmakers. As a leading member of the Prague Surrealist Group, his work is linked to a rich avant-garde tradition and an uncompromising moral stance that brought frequent tensions with the authorities in the normalization years following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Svankmajer's formative influences have been the pre-war surrealists, the Prague of Rudolf II, experimental theatre, folk puppetry and, above all, the political traumas of the past 50 years. Like his contemporaries—including playwright president Vaclav Havel, and, in exile, novelist Milan Kundera and filmmaker Milos Forman—Svankmajer's dominant life experiences have been the realities of the Stalinist system, both the explicit state terror of the 1950s and the Brezhnevist neo-Stalinism of the 1970s and the 1980s. After training in puppetry and working in the Prague theatre, he made his first film in 1964. He directed a number of important films in the 1960s, including the live-action and Kafkaesque Byt (The Flat, 1968) and Zahrada (The Garden, 1968) and consolidated his international reputation with Moznosti dialogu (Dimensions of Dialogue) in 1982. Since then, he has continued his highly visual and poetic approach in two feature-length films, Neco z Alenky (Alice, 1987) and Lekce Faust (Faust, 1994). As a filmmaker, Svankmajer is constantly exploring and analyzing his concern with power, fear and anxiety, confrontation and destruction, magic, the irrational and the absurd, and displays a bleak outlook on the possibilities for dialogue. In challenging accepted narrative, the bourgeoisie of realism (nezval), and the thematic and formal conventions of the mainstream media, Svankmajer's work is startlingly dynamic, subversive, and confrontational.

Author: Jan Svankmajer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857723499
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

View

Book Description
Jan Aevankmajer wrote this remarkable book on tactile art when he stopped directing films after censorship by the Czechoslovakian government and experimented intensively with tactile phenomena and the creative imagination. Illustrated with over 100 images, the book is organised around many reproductions of Aevankmajer's wondrous tactile art objects, tactile poems, experiments and games. It also includes dialogues with, and artworks by, other collaborating artists from the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists. Aevankmajer also gathers together as contributors such notable exponents of tactual experience as Edgar Allen Poe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim, Ay-O, and F.T. Marinetti. Michael Havas, producer of some of Aevankmajer's films, says of the book: 'it is typically Aevankmajer: erudite and very consequential. Sometimes also very funny and erotic. Totally unique.'

Author: Peter Hames
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748686835
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 273

View

Book Description
Examines the key themes and traditions of Czech and Slovak cinema, linking inter-war and post-war cinemas together with developments in the post-Communist period.

Author: Jan Švankmajer
Publisher: Arbor Vitae Press
ISBN: 9788074670169
Category : Animated films
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
Although the art and films of Jan Švankmajer enjoy wide international recognition today, ranking him among the most original artists of the last decades, many aspects of his life and work have remained unexplored. Nor has any book yet tried to systematically and comprehensively mark out the path of the formation and development in the work of this film-maker, artist, experimenter, poet and 'militant Surrealist' and thus show how the different sides converse with each other. The present book is the most comprehensive monograph on Jan Švankmajer so far, it describes with greater depth and precision aspects of his life and work and it invites the reader to dive into a wonderfully rich and coherent, distinctive and unique universe. The essays emphasise and illuminate characteristic attributes of Švankmajer's work - puppet theatre, Mannerism, Surrealism, collaboration with Eva Švankmajerová, his own film idiom, and also comparatively little known elements such as obsessional passion for collecting, first formative years and experiences.

Author: Graeme Harper
Publisher: Wallflower Press
ISBN: 9781904764861
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 200

View

Book Description
Critics from the UK, US, Australia, Canada and Japan discuss views on canonical surrealist works , and the role of surrealism in modern cinema, animation, digital cinema and documentary.

Author: Keith Leslie Johnson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025205007X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 269

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Scott MacKenzie
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520377478
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 674

View

Book Description
Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is the first book to collect manifestoes from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestoes, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world. This volume collects the major European “waves” and figures (Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bergman, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ‘95); Latin American Third Cinemas (Birri, Sanjinés, Espinosa, Solanas); radical art and the avant-garde (Buñuel, Brakhage, Deren, Mekas, Ono, Sanborn); and world cinemas (Iimura, Makhmalbaf, Sembene, Sen). It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bollaín, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, Painlevé, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI's Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture.

Author: Peter Hames
Publisher: Wallflower Press
ISBN: 9781904764427
Category : Czechoslovakia
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
This study of the most significant movement in post-war Central and East European cinema examines the origins and development of Czechoslovakian film during this time, as well as the political and cultural changes which influenced some of the most important works.

Author: Eva Švankmajerová
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 148

View

Book Description
Fiction. Translated from the Czech by Gwendolyn Albert. BARADLA CAVE is a novel by the Czech Surrealist Eva Svankmajerova, perhaps best known for her paintings and collaboration with her husband Jan Svankmajer on a number of films; this book includes illustrations by the pair. Originally published in samizdat (i.e. passed hand to hand in cheaply printed editions and against Communist law) in the 1980s, BARADLA CAVE was republished in 1995 by Edice Analogon, having lost none of the force of its social critique and wit. Baradla is a living organism, both a place (Prague) and a person (a woman), and the novel explores maternity and femininity while offering a satirical look at the overweening mother-state and consumer society.