Jan Svankmajer

This synoptic study of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934) presents his career in terms of a Surrealist outlook informed by an idiosyncratic animism. More than any other recent filmmaker, Švankmajer provides access to a “flat ontology”—a vision of the world with a single, uncanny order of being, where all things are, as it were, at once animated and inert, puppet-like. The screen of animist cinema is not therefore an abstract “field” in which human actors disport themselves against a backdrop of neutral, unresponsive objects, but more akin to an alchemist’s lab, where the proper incantation and ritual unlocks the potential for life hidden in all things. Švankmajer draws on the language and imagery of the occult so as to liberate the mind, less from rationality itself as from a certain straitened conception of it, decoupled from intuition and the creative imagination. The occult provides “technologies” for accessing these (e.g., Tarot, magic squares, alternative alphabets, symbol systems, etc.) and leaping thereby over the palings of stale, orthodox thought. This book examines Švankmajer’s animist cinema as it emerges in five conceptual “habitats”: that of the object; that of the animal; that of the creature (located between object and animal); that of the polis; and that of the ecosphere as a whole.