The ‘Godfather of Animated Cinema’ Makes More Than Just Movies

AMSTERDAM — The Czech master of Surrealist cinema, Jan Svankmajer, is revered by animators for his stop-motion movies that are by turns absurd, grotesque, erotic and horrific.

In his short film “Lunch,” from the 1992 series “Food,” two restaurant patrons, ignored by a waiter, devour everything in sight: napkins, plates, cups, their own clothes and, ultimately, each other. In “Little Otik,” a feature film from 2000 based on a Czech fairy tale, a childless couple adopts a tree stump, which comes to life but then turns homicidal.

How to interpret these darkly comic narratives? For a time during the 1970s, the Communist government of Czechoslovakia banned Mr. Svankmajer (pronounced SHVUNK-myer) from filmmaking, because they saw his movies as subversive. In an interview in Amsterdam last week, he said that this was “no tragedy” for him, because he always had been a multidimensional artist, and he used the hiatus as a time to work on his other creative project: Surrealist sculpture, lithographs, writing and drawing.

These artworks, created while Mr. Svankmajer was unable to make films, are one of the most intriguing aspects of a new exhibition at the Eye Filmmuseum here, running through March 3. “Jan Svankmajer: The Alchemical Wedding” presents around 250 extraordinary artworks that give a glimpse into Mr. Svankmajer’s wild imagination. These are displayed alongside a dozen of his short films on large screens in its exhibition hall. The museum is also screening feature-length films such as “Alice” (1987), “Faust” (1994) and his most recent, “Insect,” released this year in a cinema program.

“There are a lot of big names like Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay for whom Jan Svankmajer is really the godfather of animated cinema,” said Jaap Guldemond, director of exhibitions at the Eye Filmmuseum. “Filmmakers know him, but the general public has no idea who Mr. Svankmajer is.”

Mr. Guldemond visited Mr. Svankmajer’s studio outside Prague and his 18th-century country house in the Bohemian Forest, and said he was overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of artworks Mr. Svankmajer had created over his 50-year career.

“There were piles of hundreds of his etchings and collages, and hundreds of sculptures, and we could choose what we wanted,” Mr. Guldemond said. “We didn’t have to get it from all kinds of different museums and collectors. It was just all there.”

Mr. Svankmajer was born in 1934, and was 13 when Czechoslovakia came under Communist rule. He studied theater directing and puppeteering, and worked at the Semafor playhouse in Prague before joining the Laterna Magika, an experimental company sometimes called the world’s first multimedia theater. In the 1960s, he joined the Czech Surrealist Group and applied its principles to his art.

“The audiences were leaving my productions disgusted,” he said, because they couldn’t understand the avant-garde aesthetics.

“That was when I realized that cinema is like a kind of time capsule, like a can where you can preserve a stage production and wait for the viewer,” he said. “I decided to focus on using the language of cinema.”

But making films in the Czech studio system meant that Mr. Svankmajer had to submit his proposals for approval, then submit the scripts, then the final film, and the censors could always reject the film at any stage.

In 1974, after his film “Leonardo’s Diary” was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, his work was condemned by a pro-government newspaper. The movie he was working on at the time, “Castle of Otranto,” came under greater scrutiny, and censors demanded he make many changes. Mr. Svankmajer refused and as a result was banned from filmmaking. He could not finish his movie until 1979 when the prohibition was lifted.

“I never was a political artist,” Mr. Svankmajer said “but I am an engaged artist, because Surrealism was always an engaged art. The idea of Surrealism is to change the world — that’s Marx — and to transform life — that’s Rimbaud,” he added, referring to the 19th century French poet.

Mr. Svankmajer’s films combine many animation techniques, including claymation, drawn animation, montage, puppetry and stop-motion, sometimes using actors for live-action as well. He often darkens the mood by incorporating exaggerated sounds, like high-volume slurping or chewing, or juxtaposing lilting classical music over unsettling images.

Many of Mr. Svankmajer’s two- and three-dimensional artworks are also based on this form of collage and assemblage, cutting and pasting. They include illustrations in books onto which he’s pasted images of eyes or genitals, or cut-up anatomical and scientific drawings with mismatched parts arranged in new configurations. His sculptures are fantastical animal amalgams, made from taxidermy, bones, fins, shells, horns or skulls combined into strange, hybrid creatures.

“When I arrive in the studio and there’s this pile of bones and stuffed things and natural objects, I know that the beast is in there and I just need to find it,” Mr. Svankmajer said. “That’s the adventure.”

The exhibition in Amsterdam also includes artworks created in the last decade or so. A series of “medium drawings,” Mr. Svankmajer said, were created recently by his wife, the Surrealist painter Eva Svankmajerova, even though she died in 2005. He has built himself a spiritualist chamber called the psychomanteum, where he looks into a mirror, summons her spirit and allows her to draw using his hands, he explained.

Mr. Svankmajer remained straight-faced as he said this. “Of course, I don’t believe in ghosts,” he added. “This is a communication with my subconscious.”

Mr. Svankmajer, 84, said he felt fortunate that he has been able to produce so much work over the years, and that he could do so now in the Czech Republic, without concerns about censorship.

He still goes to his studio four days a week, where he’s currently working on a new series of lithographs and finishing up a novel that will be released in 2019, he said. He’s also completing a group of sculptures he calls “fractures,” which are made from bones, found objects and “discarded articles of daily use,” held together with bandages.

“Fractures,” could be an apt title for Mr. Svankmajer’s life’s work, a process of breaking things apart and bandaging them back together as something else. Under communism, he said, “you had these waves of the grip being relaxed and the grip tightening, and I was lucky enough to have experienced two waves of relaxation of the regime,” he said. “I was unlucky enough to catch one wave of the tightening.”

Asked how he thinks the censorship impacted his career as a filmmaker, he shrugged. “It turns out I was at my most productive period,” he said. When the authorities allowed him to make films again, he had “all these scripts and ideas.”

“So in a sense you can even take advantage of the totalitarian system,” he said. “Provided that it collapses in the end.”

Jan Svankmajer: The Alchemical Wedding
Through March 3 at the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; eyefilm.nl.

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