Jan Svankmajer is a major figure of contemporary East European animation whose surrealistic, often macabre work owes more to the nightmarish visions of Kafka and Bunuel than to the sunny daydreams of Walt Disney and his creative progeny. Noted for investing otherwise ordinary objects with ominous overtones, Svankmajer reached his widest audience to date with a feature-length adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” (1988) which blended animated and live-action footage—a technique he had earlier used to hair-raising effect in “Down to the Cellar” (1983). He is a major influence on the somewhat better known animation artists, The Brothers Quay, as evinced by their 1984 tribute, “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer”. (TMC)

Jan Švankmajer is a Czech animator and artist, born in Prague in 1939, he was given a puppetry theater for his eight birthday, and went on to study puppetry at the College of Applied Arts. A member of the Prague surrealist group, he has made 27 short films and 7 feature-length films, and has worked in various additional artistic functions on a few films. From 1972 to 1979, he was blacklisted from making any films by the Communist Party, during which time he worked instead with sculpture, ceramics, poetry and other static art forms, resulting in a body of work he refers to as his “tactile experiments.” Some of his static art and the art of his wife, Eva Švankmajerová, at his gallery, Galerie Gambra.

For quite a while, it was hard to obtain copies of Švankmajer’s works, but there were fans of his surreal works around the world. This Animation World Network page, last updated in 1996, highlights some of the Švankmajer’s films released up to that period. In 2007, 26 shorts were collected on 2 DVDs, as reviewed and described on Cine Outsider.

You can find his 27 shorts online, along with his first five films. Many films are without spoken language, some are only in Czech, and others have been dubbed or were released in English.

Shorts:
The Last Trick (1964)
Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasy in G minor (1965)
A Game with Stones (1965)
Punch and Judy (1966)
Et Cetera (1966)
Historia Naturae (Suita) (1967)
The Garden (1968)
The Flat (1968)
Picnic With Weissmann (1968)
A Quiet Week in the House (1969)
Don Juan (1970)
The Ossuary (1970)
Jaberwocky (1971)
Leonardo’s Diary (1972)
Castle Of Otranto (1973-1979)
The Fall Of The House Of Usher, part 2 (1980) with English subs
Dimensions of Dialogue (1982)
Down to the Cellar (1983)
The Pendulum, The Pit And Hope (1983)
Virile Games (1988)
Another Kind of Love (music video for Hugh Cornwell) (1988)
Meat Love (1989)
Darkness/ Light/ Darkness (1990)
Flora (1989)
Animated Self Portraits (1989), or just watch Jan’s portrait
The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (1990)
Food (1992)

Feature length films:
Alice (1988)
Faust (1994)
Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)
Little Otik (2000)
Lunacy (2005) Czech, with Italian subs

If you want more personal insight, here’s an interview with Švankmajer, circa 1997, and The Decalogue of Jan Švankmajer, or ten rules that guide his work, as written by Švankmajer himself. And one final documentary: The animator of Prague (1990) BBC

Source: metafilter.com

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