Transmuter of meaning

From December 15 to 18, at the Rodina Cinema Center, the St. Petersburg Cinema Museum is showing four programs of short films by Czech director Jan Svankmajer in the Film Encyclopedia cycle.

He is called a classic of surrealism, and his works in cinema are called original and experimental. Texts about him are full of philosophical terms and provoking definitions - paranoid dream logic, black grotesque, mystification, shamanism et cetera. And he continues to build his alternative world with the help of improvised objects and inexhaustible imagination, continues to play in his dreams in reality, because dreams, by his own definition, are that part of life where neither the laws of nature nor the laws of society have power over us. Like the Elder Pliny, he creates his “Natural History” (1967), and this 9-minute film is not inferior to the thick tome of the Roman classic...
Jan Švankmajer comes from a childhood where he considers the view of a lost paradise to be highly distorted: “There is nothing pleasant in our lonely birth.” His very first memory dates back to the pre-war years, when as a four-year-old child he and his parents moved into a new apartment, the walls of which were painted brown. After this, the brown tint permeates throughout Švankmajer’s work.
The loneliness of modern people due to their inability to communicate occupies the Prague puppeteer no less than the relationship between spirit and matter. Analyzing the methods of human communication (“Possibilities of Dialogue”, 1982) by means known only to him, he comes to the conclusion: “Our rationalistic civilization is based on the identification principle of thinking, and this is characteristic of primitive cultures and, of course, small children”...
As a puppet set designer and director by profession, Jan Švankmajer idolizes animation. With its help, he succeeds in metamorphosing the functions of real objects, and in combination with a living person, irrational concreteness is born, which allows him to crack the reinforced concrete of stereotypes. Let's drill holes in the doors of our perception, the director seems to suggest. Everything that we see through these holes will be so different from the familiar world that it’s tempting to recoil and run in horror, but why do you want to look and look without stopping? Maybe because these phantasmagoria rhyme with our own half-guess-half-dreams?
The power of imagination gives birth to poetry, and now tactile poems appear before us in the form of fancy pieces of clay, capturing the touch of the artist’s fingers - his message to us, the blind, unwilling or unable to discern the confrontation and conspiratorial alliance of things.
Svankmajer's aesthetic has something of a documentary reportage about an event that never happened, but which is possible. The story about him is so true. In these films, the meaning is turned inside out and all the more real: objects use people, a person is consumed by food, and the hope of salvation turns out to be a thinly constructed death trap of one’s own fear. This is him, the genius of paradoxes, friend, magician and wizard of meaning - Jan Švankmajer...

Alexey NEDVIGA