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 Johnson's Jan Švankmajer is a triumph: a bold, synoptic, and elegantly written conceptual survey that brings fully to life the animating ideas of the Czech surrealist artist-filmmaker. Attending to the work of animation as a philosophy of life rather than an aesthetic technique alone, Johnson's book lucidly presents Švankmajer's art as the bearer of 'a vital, emergent, biopolitical, ethical, and ecological outlook.' Featuring detailed analyses of the artist's full body of cinematic, artistic, and curatorial work, as well as an illuminating set of interviews, Jan Švankmajer presents the Czech artist in vital, living color."—Jonathan Eburne, author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime
|Keith Leslie Johnson is a lecturer of English and film and media studies at the College of William and Mary.