Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• The Film Experiment
• Jan Svankmajer's Films: A Mannerist Surrealist
• Thinking through Things: The Presence of Objects in the Early Films of Jan Svankmajer
• Interview with Jan Svankmajer conducted
• The Power of Imagination
• Filmography
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This collection of essays is the first book-length work in English on Czech film animator Svankmajer. Hames and his contributors are all veteran British commentators on the avant-garde cinema, but Hames (author of The Czechoslovak New Wave, CH, Mar'86, and other works on the cinema of Eastern Europe, and organizer of a large retrospective of Czech and Slovak film at the National Film Theatre of Britain) inspired the current book. Svankmajer is portrayed as an imaginative force in the surrealist circle that persisted in the post-Stalinist world of Eastern Europe. Hames suggests Svankmajer persevered along his path into an artistic form that challenged "socialist realism" because animated films were taken to be less socially significant than feature films (whose makers often struggled to cling to a bit of anti-Stalinist radicalism or were reduced to silence). Included among the essays is Hames's lengthy interview of Svankmajer. Also included are a group of evocative stills from both live-action and animated films. For a more general overview, readers will wish to consult Hames's Five Filmmakers: Tarkovsky, Forman, Polanski, Szab'o, Makavejev, ed. by Daniel Goulding (CH, Nov'94). Researchers; faculty. T. Cripps; Morgan State University