If you make the world's coolest, creepiest animation and no one in Hollywood sees it, does it still make a sound? In the case of Jan Svankmajer, the answer is yes.
Svankmajer has spent much of the past 40 years working in the relative cinematic obscurity of Prague, his hometown, where he has handcrafted 32 wondrously bizarre, funny and deeply disturbing films. Though he remains the most anonymous of the world's essential filmmakers, Svankmajer's also one of the more influential: Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and David Cronenberg are all students of what might be called the Svankmajer School of the Grotesque.
Svankmajer's films, which combine stop-motion animation with live action, are fearless, nightmarish, hilarious and terrifying, sometimes all at once. He's been compared to Kafka, Lewis Carroll and Disney, and, in a 1994 New Yorker profile, described as "the last great obsessive in cinema -- the end of a distinguished line that goes back to Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel and Carl Theodor Dreyer."
So you'd think any new Svankmajer project would be a major event in the film world. No such luck. His latest, Lunacy, a 2005 tribute to the Marquis de Sade and Edgar Allan Poe, made less than $50,000 at the U.S. box office, a sad total that ranked slightly behind his Otesánek (2000). Fortunately for fans of handmade animation, adventurous narratives, political allegories and creative uses of meat, most of Svankmajer's films, including Lunacy, are now available on DVD.
Svankmajer, who perfectly fits the profile of an obsessed artist, seems unconcerned about box office success, saying he's interested only in the process of making the movies. To him, the post-filmmaking process -- the promotional tours, festivals and interviews -- is "a kind of death." Still, cosmic justice would be served if Svankmajer's works were seen outside university classrooms and artsy urban theaters.
Svankmajer started making movies in the early 1960s. His first classics -- the dueling-puppets debut The Last Trick (1964); the stone-and bone-imation films Games With Stones (1965) and The Ossuary (1970); the haunting, nature-and-man fantasia Jabberwocky (1971) -- were absurdist scenarios featuring the kind of pitch-black, life-and-death comic tone that seems impossible for anyone outside Eastern Europe to replicate.
But these weren't comedies for comedy's sake. Svankmajer has been called a "militant surrealist," and by 1972, the Communist Party, alarmed by the nihilistic and anti-authoritarian tone of his films, banned him from moviemaking.
After a few years of creating intricate objects d'art with his late wife Eva Svankmajerová, Svankmajer started animating again. Supporters smuggled materials into Czechoslovakia, and he made the most of them. (The frame-by-frame process of stop-motion animation represents an especially stingy use of film stock.) His bitterly funny, three-part Dimensions of Dialogue won awards at festivals across Europe in 1982.
Svankmajer's first feature, the 1988 film Alice, reclaimed Lewis Carroll's book from its Disneyfied safety, turning it into a horrifying, soul-wracking (and occasionally tedious) viewing experience. Alice shrinks from cute girl into fragile, eerie china doll, and the White Rabbit, played by a taxidermic ex-rabbit, has flesh-tearing fangs, a habit of self-mutilation and a tendency to spill his sawdust guts on the floor. Childhood has never looked so much like a fever dream.
Alice and Svankmajer's short films remained nearly impossible to see during the Soviet era. Surprisingly, his audience hasn't grown much since the fall of the wall, despite occasional retrospectives and worshipful essays in French film journals.
Grappling with the new, capitalistic regime has been good for Svankmajer's work, though, giving the artist an opportunity to compare and contrast totalitarianism with what he calls a "civilization that feels the need to devour everything."
His short Food remains cinema's funniest, most disturbing indictment of consumer culture. In the second of the film's three linked vignettes (called Lunch), two men, unable to get the attention of a waiter, start eating the flowers, plates, tablecloth and chairs, their animated mouths filling the whole screen as they take increasingly ravenous bites.
Although Lunacy has the lowest animation-to-live-action ratio of any of his features, Svankmajer remains one of the best craftsmen the art form has produced. He breathes life into familiar objects, including scissors, faucets and suit coats, and turns meat, sliced-open animal carcasses and real blood into piercing reminders of mortality and futility.
To the uninitiated, the guts and gore might seem cruel. To Svankmajer and his fans, they are transcendent.
"For me, animated film is about magic," Svankmajer said in a 1990 BBC documentary. "This is how magic becomes part of daily life, invading daily life.... Magic enters into a quite ordinary contact with mundane things ... (making) reality seem doubtful."
