Jan Svankmajer’s beginnings as a filmmaker date from the Prague Spring of 1968. Czechoslovakia’s own New Wave cinema had already been flourishing for a few years. In this political and artistic context, Svankmajer (b. 1934) made a handful of anarchic, daring short works until the inevitable run-in with government censors in 1972 that ended with a seven-year ban on filmmaking in the context of the Czech New Wave and the Prague Spring. He returned to cinema in the 1980s, although his situation remained difficult until the Velvet Revolution got under way at the end of that decade, by which time Svankmajer had forged an international reputation and was beginning to make feature films.

Svankmajer is often referred to as an animator and his films display a wide variety of techniques, including puppetry, clay figures and stop-motion animation. Crucially, all of these techniques are imbedded within a live-action frame. Svankmajer uses animation not to create a fictional world but rather to reveal the hidden life of the real world. As Svankmajer has put it, “I am interested not in animation techniques or creating a complete illusion, but in bringing life to everyday objects." This remark reveals Svankmajer as a surrealist filmmaker, recalling as it does Lautréamont’s famous phrase, “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table."

For Svankmajer, surrealism is not an aesthetic movement but a philosophy, an approach to the world that rejects the tyranny of rationalism as akin to totalitarianism. Cinema affords the opportunity of a rich engagement with the material world that allows the unconscious to flourish. Hence his love of making creatures out of old objects whose imperfections reveal their tactile history.

Until recently, Svankmajer had a crucial partner: Eva Svankmajerová (1940-2005), a surrealist painter and ceramicist as well as Svankmajer’s wife. She worked on the production design and animation of virtually all of his films, particularly the construction of the object-creatures. The two also collaborated on a series of art pieces in the 1970s, while Svankmajer was banned from filmmaking.

The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to present a program of Svankmajer’s short works accompanied by some of his more audacious early features. — David Pendleton