Jan Švankmajer
The castle of Horní Staňkov. Camera enters the castle park. Approaching Kunstkamera, it stops at the emblem of Ouroboros above the entrance. The door opens, letting the camera in, to reveal the magical square with astrological figures of Virgo and Libra, combined with Dog and Lion from Chinese zodiac. A painting of Rudolf II as Vertumnus, more Arcimboldos. The camera continues to the main hall. A huge stone fireplace with ceramic statues. African fetishes, ritual masks, Bis poles and masks from Papua New Guinea, spiritualists´ drawings, surrealistic photographs, and paintings etc. In this way, the whole Kunstkamera collection will be filmed. Time to time, as if by mistake, an object will appear in the shot, reminding of the fact that the place is inhabited.
The Dung Beetle is late, the Parasite is asleep and Mrs Larva is more interested in her knitting than the director’s instructions. It’s clear: this amateur theatre company has a long way to go before they can perform their version of The Insect Play, a famous satirical work from 1922 by the brothers Karel and Josef Čapek which features insects with decidedly human traits: greed, egocentrism, jealousy.
A tortuous journey, in the company of the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, around the figure of the enigmatic and visionary French poet Raymond Roussel (1877-1933).
One of the best Czech composers of film soundtracks is often described as a genius of film scores. He was not afraid to experiment and the timelessness of his work is proven by the admiration of the world, including the generation who came to know his music only after his death.
Eugene, an aging man, leads a double life – one real, the other in his dreams. He goes to see a psychoanalyst, who tries to interpret the meaning of his dreams. Eugene finds a way of entering his dream-world at will and finds out about his childhood and what really happened to his parents.
Featuring all 26 entries in the official filmography, this is the world's first complete DVD edition of the short films by the legendary Czech Surrealist filmmaker-animator Jan Švankmajer. Technically and conceptually astonishing in their own right, these films are also as remarkable for their philosophical consistency as for their frequently mind-boggling imagery. This package also includes a bonus short, Johanes Doktor Faust (1958), the longer cut of 'The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer' with a new introduction by the Quay Brothers, the documentary Les Chimeres des Švankmajer (2001), interviews with Jan and Eva Švankmajer and examples of their work in other media. There's also a chance to see some Švankmajer special effects, created when he was banned from directing his own films.
A collection of short films by 16 European directors.
A collection of short films by 16 European directors.
Loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade. In 19th century France a young man is plagued by nightmares in which he is dragged off to a madhouse. On the journey back from his mother’s funeral he is invited by a Marquis he meets at lunch to spend the night in his castle. There he witnesses a blasphemous orgy and a ‘therapeutic’ funeral. He tries to flee but is taken to a lunatic asylum where the patients have complete freedom and the staff are locked up behind bars.
For the past 40 years, Jan Svankmajer (Faust, Conspirators of Pleasure) has been hailed as one of cinema's most consistently surprising, wildly imaginative, and remarkable surrealists of our time. Utilizing a delirious combination of puppets, humans, stop-motion animation, and live action, Svankmajer's films conjure up a dreamlike universe that is at once dark, macabre, witty, and perversely visceral. KimStim (and Kino) is proud to to offer this collection of remarkable short works from an artist that has mesmerized audiences the world over and has inspired filmmakers from the Brothers Quay to Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam.
When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife's pain, the man finds a piece of root in the backyard and chops it and varnishes it into the shape of a child. However the woman takes the root as her baby and starts to pretend that it is real.
Six outwardly average individuals have elaborate fetishes they indulge with surreptitious care. A mousy letter carrier makes dough balls she grotesquely ingests before bed. A shop clerk fixates on a TV news reader while he builds a machine to massage and masturbate him. One of his customers makes an elaborate chicken costume for a voodoo-like scene with a doll resembling his plump neighbor. She, in turn, has a doll that resembles him, which she whips and dominates in an abandoned church. The TV news reader has her own fantasy involving carp. Her husband, who is indifferent to her, steals materials to fashion elaborate artifacts that he rubs, scrapes and rolls across his body.
A very free adaptation of Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus', Goethe's 'Faust' and various other treatments of the old legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil. Svankmajer's Faust is a nondescript man who, after being lured by a strange map into a sinister puppet theatre, finds himself immersed in an indescribably weird version of the play, blending live actors, clay animation and giant puppets.
BREAKFAST: After eating breakfast, a man is transformed into an elaborate dumb-waiter-style breakfast dispenser - and the same fate befalls the man who obtains breakfast from him. LUNCH: After failing to catch the waiter's eye, two would-be diners end up eating everything within reach. DINNER: Portraits of various meals made up of human organs.
Švankmajer demonstrates the darkly humorous approach to life and politics which the Czech authorities at one time regarded as so subversive that they banned him from film-making for eight years.
A bust of Stalin is cut open on an operating table, leading to an elaborate animated depiction of Czech history from 1948 (the Communist takeover) to 1989 (the Velvet Revolution). Some knowledge of the subject is essential in order to understand the film, which is entirely visual.
This half-hour BBC documentary offers a revealing look at Svankmajer at work on "Death of Stalinism in Bohemia," and uses excerpts from his earlier films to trace the development of his unique sensibility.
An animated film compiled by David Ehrlich consisting of 27 animators from different countries all explaining themselves through their animation.
A human body gradually reconstructs itself as its various component parts crowd themselves into a small room and eventually, after much experimentation, sort out which part goes where.
A quiet young English girl named Alice finds herself in an alternate version of her own reality after chasing a white rabbit. She becomes surrounded by living inanimate objects and stuffed dead animals, and must find a way out of this nightmare- no matter how twisted or odd that way must be. A memorably bizarre screen version of Lewis Carroll’s novel ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’.
Svankmajer's music video for Hugh Cornwell's "Another Kind of Love."
A man sits down to watch a football match, which seems to consist of the players being violently mutilated in various inventive ways. The players then leave the football pitch and invade the spectator's flat...
It is a story of three veterans released from the army. During one night spent camping in the country they one by one wake up and meet three elvish brothers. Each of the veterans is given a magic item - one gets magic harp that provides him with servants by wish, other one endless pouch of gold and the last one owns magic hat that can create all the staff excluding money and people.
A short film based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "A Torture by Hope".
A little girl goes down to the basement cellar to fetch some potatoes, and finds all her hidden fears about the cellar depicted in animated form.
In this animated version of Edgar Allan Poe's story, a traveller arrives at the Usher mansion to find that the sibling inhabitants are living under a mysterious family curse: The brother's senses have become painfully acute, while his sister has become nearly catatonic.
The vagrant student Martin volunteers for a quest to cure princess Adriana, who is kept ill by a queer sort of disease. He does in no way anticipate that the princess is under the spell of the powerful magician Andlobrandini, who is preparing a rejuvenating elixir prepared with the blood of nine human children's hearts.
When famous detective Nick Carter visits Prague, he becomes involved in strange case of a missing dog and even stranger carnivorous plant. He becomes convinced that he is standing against his greatest enemy, the Gardener, who supposedly died years ago in a swamp...
"The Castle of Otranto" is animation/short/mockumentary based on "The Castle of Otranto", a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole, the first Gothic novel. The novel takes place in Otranto in southern Italy. In Jan Svankmajer's mocumentary, the amateur archaeologist Dr Vozáb has set to prove that the supernatural ghost love story takes place not in Italy but in Otranto Castle near Nachod in Czechoslovakia.
Animated drawings inspired by Leonardo da Vinci are intercut with seemingly unrelated (but in fact strangely similar) live-action scenes.
In stop-motion animation, a wardrobe moves through the countryside. It arrives in a house, a child's voice recites Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," and various objects, such as toys and dolls, move about, disintegrate, and play out archetypal scenes. Like Carroll's verse, the images are at once familiar and unfamiliar. A child's play suit, hanging in the wardrobe, becomes the adventure's protagonist.
A non-narrative voyage round Sedlec Ossuary, which has been constructed from over 50,000 human skeletons (victims of the Black Death).
A man, apparently on the run, takes shelter in a dilapidated house. Every day, he drills a hole through a wall and looks into one of the rooms, each time seeing a different surreal vision...
In one of Jan Svankmajer's many mind-blowing, deliberately weird short films, a picnic consists of a suit sunbathing, a phonograph playing records, a shovel digging holes, and a camera taking pictures.
Frank visits his friend Josef, who introduces him to his pedigree rabbits and his wife Mary. Frank is more interested in the slightly unsettling fact that Josef and Mary's garden fence is entirely made up of living people holding hands. Finally, Frank asks Josef how he manages to keep the fence together..
An eight-part animated portrait of various species, accompanied by a different style of music. The various parts are: Aquatilia (foxtrot), Hexapoda (bolero), Pisces (blues), Reptilia (tarantella), Aves (tango), Mammalia (minuet), Simiae (polka) and Homo (waltz). Each animation mixes drawings, pictures, real animals and animated skeletons.
In 1967, Jan Švankmajer participated in the Terre des Hommes competition of the Montreal International Film Festival by submitting "L'homme et la technique." The rules of this international competition stipulated that the films should last 50 seconds, contain no dialogue and be inspired by the themes of Expo 67. This very rare film, which does not appear in the official filmography of Jan Švankmajer, is today preserved by the Cinémathèque Québécoise. Obviously inspired by the director's 1966 short film "Et Cetera," "L'homme et la technique" tackles the themes of reality and dreams.
Two puppets, Punch and Judy, do battle to the death over the custody of a live guinea pig.
A man plays the Bach piece of the title on the organ, accompanied by images of stone walls with cracks and holes that grow and shrink, intercut with images of doors and wire-meshed windows.
In this early stop-motion film by Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer, a device consisting of a clock, a pendulum, a faucet and a bucket enacts a series of events whenever the clock chimes.
Two magicians, Mr.Schwarzwald and Mr.Edgar, try to outdo each other in performing elaborate magic tricks, leading to a violent ending.
