TSPDT

Key Production Countries: Czechoslovakia, UK, Czech Republic
Key Genres: Animation, Short Film, Surrealist Film, Comedy, Fantasy, Avant-garde/Experimental, Satire
Key Collaborators: Marie Zemanová (Editor), Jaromír Kallista (Producer), Svatopluk Malý (Cinematographer), Pavel Nový (Leading Character Actor), Eva Svankmajerová (Production Designer), Miloslav Spála (Cinematographer), Juraj Galvánek (Cinematographer), Helena Lebdusková (Editor), Zdenek Liska (Composer), Václav Borovicka (Leading Actor), Jan Kraus (Leading Actor), Josef Soukup (Producer)

"Czech director of animated films, visual and ceramic artist… While he made a number of important films in the 1960s, including the live-action and Kafkaesque Byt/The Flat and Zahrada/The Garden (both 1968), it was not until the retrospective of his work at the 1983 Annecy Animation Festival in France that he made an international impact. A committed surrealist (he joined the Prague group in 1970), his aggressive, even sadistic, work with its emphasis on texture, juxtaposition and montage is best characterised by Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), in which opposing heads confront and devour each other in destructive interplay." - Peter Hames (Encyclopedia of European Cinema, 1995)

"Thoroughly grounded in the fertile tradition of Czech marionette theatre, his work amounts to a remarkable avant-garde reference with many different sources of inspiration (from hermeneutics to André Breton, via symbolism, or the works of Sade and Carroll) while also drawing on his own totally original personal obsessions. Jan Švankmajer has made more than thirty films (five of which are feature length), most of them animated. He is revered as a film-maker and this recognition has extended in recent years to the sphere of the plastic arts with ever more monographic exhibitions of his work in museums all around the world." - Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 2020

"Exploring dream logic through an arresting, unsettling fusion of animation, puppetry and live action, Jan Švankmajer's films possess a visceral intensity and humour, occupying a realm where horror and fantasy meet. Inspired by Federico Fellini, Georges Méliès and Eastern European traditions of puppetry, Švankmajer formally and thematically subverts expectations about animation and, like Walt Disney, is fascinated by the fairy-tale form. He is also strongly influenced by surrealists such as Luis Buñuel." - James Clarke (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"Jan Švankmajer studied stage design at the College of Applied Arts in Prague, and Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. In 1964, he made his first short film: The Last Trick. His animation films filled with fantasy and surrealism, such as Alice (1987) and Faust (1994), are highly regarded and have won many prizes, for instance in Cannes and Berlin. He is mostly known for his use of claymation and stop-motion techniques, and has been named a great influence by many filmmakers, including the Quay Brothers and Terry Gilliam." - International Film Festival Rotterdam

"Major figure of contemporary East European animation whose, surrealistic, often macabre work owes more to the nightmarish vision of Kafka and Buñuel than to the sunny daydreams of Walt Disney and his creative progeny… 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 Švankmajer." - The Virgin International Encyclopedia of Film, 1992

"I have never treated film as a means of communication above any other. In the same unrelenting way, I put collages together, assemble objects, make graphics, ceramics or I engage myself in tactile experimentation. The surrealists say that there is only one poetry and it does not matter which means we use to capture it." - Jan Švankmajer (AnOther Magazine, 2011)