Czech animation filmmaker and visual artist, born on 4 September 1934 in Prague.
Life
Jan Švankmajer studied stage design at the Higher School of Applied Arts in Prague (1950-1954), then directing and stage design in the puppetry department of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (1954-1958). After the Theatre of Masks, around 1962 he joined the Laterna Magika, where until 1964 he ran the black-light theatre company. His first film, The Last Trick, dates from 1964.
He married Eva Dvořáková, the painter Eva Švankmajerová, with whom in 1970 he joined the Czechoslovak Surrealist group led by Vratislav Effenberger. From 1972 to 1979 he was banned from filming for refusing to give way over the editing of The Castle of Otranto, and worked at the Barrandov studios as a designer and special-effects maker. In 1991, with Jaromír Kallista, he founded the Athanor studio in a former cinema in Knovíz. Eva Švankmajerová died in 2005, shortly before the release of Lunacy.
The work
After many short films, including Dimensions of Dialogue, awarded the Golden Bear in Berlin and the Grand Prix at Annecy in 1983, he made his feature films: Alice (1988), Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), Little Otik (2000), Lunacy (2005), Surviving Life (2010) and Insect (2018).
In his visual work, collage has been central since the 1960s (the Svank-meyers Bilderlexikon, begun in the early 1970s). From 1974 he carried out tactile experiments, which he summed up in 1983 in a book circulated in samizdat, Touching and Imagination; tactile objects became one of the major parts of his work.
Exhibitions and collections
- Crystal Globe of the Karlovy Vary festival for his contribution to world cinema (2009).
- The Subversion of Images, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, January to March 2025, with a Sans titre (2009, collage made from material for the film Surviving Life, 45 x 54 cm).