The Death and Rebirth of Surrealism in Bohemia: Local Inflections and Cosmopolitan Aspirations in the Cinema of Jan Švankmajer

Abstract

Since the mid 1980s Jan Švankmajer's work has attracted the attention of connoisseurs and aficionados of surrealism across the globe. This essay complicates the idea of Švankmajer's universal surrealist appeal by considering it in its specific historical and geopolitical context. It argues that Švankmajer's surrealism has a local, yet emphatically cosmopolitan, inflection. A recognition of this local specificity is not only crucial to a more informed reception of Švankmajer's cinema, it also affords a better understanding of the vicissitudes of surrealism in general, and Czech surrealism in particular. This reading of Švankmajer's work identifies a space where a politicised, rather than utterly commodified, surrealist practice is still possible.

Keywords:

• surrealism
• cosmopolitanism
• the uncanny

Notes

¹ A retrospective of Švankmajer's work and the Grand Prize for Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) at the 1983 Annecy Animation Festival (France) marked the beginning of international interest in his films.

² Brigid Cherry (2002) also identified the uncanny and the grotesque as central to Švankmajer's cinema. However, she attributed these qualities to the filmmaker's gothic rather than surrealist sensibility.

³ Marija Čermínová (better known as Toyen) and Jindrich Štyrský quite openly expressed this view while trying to develop an alternative, which they called artificialism. In the statements issued in conjunction with the 1927 exhibitions of their works in Paris and Prague they described artificialism as ‘an abstract consciousness of reality … defined by poetic perceptions of memories’ (Pachmanova, 2001, p. 131). Their innovative painterly techniques attempted to restore the affective value of depicted objects by ‘evok[ing] emotions … based on tactile as well as visual impressions’ (Bydžovská, 2005). In his attention to the texture and emotive charge of objects and with his mobilisation of the viewer's tactile perception (Cardinal, 1995; Jackson, 1997; Sorfa, 2006) Švankmajer follows in Toyen and Štyrský's footsteps. He has stated that he likes to work with ‘objects that people have touched and on which they have left the imprint of their emotions, for I believe … that these imprinted emotions charge the matter of the object which then under certain circumstances?for instance in the case of sensitive animation?are able to reappear’ (quoted in Sorfa, 2006).

⁴ As film critics like to point out (Jackson, 1997), as if this had somehow determined his creative predispositions, 1934 was also the year when Švankmajer was born in Prague.

⁵ The Paris–Prague surrealist connection was, of course, not out of sync with more mainstream sentiments at the time. Up until the Munich conference in 1938—when the agreement was signed between Germany, Italy, Great Britain and France which allowed Hitler to occupy the Sudetenland in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles—France and Czechoslovakia had been military allies (Davies, 1997, pp. 987–995).

⁶ Despite their familiarity with Freud's progressive views on this matter, Breton's circle were less interested in children's sexuality. Švankmajer, however, continues to cultivate this aspect of the Czechoslovakian tradition, which lends itself so readily to typically surrealist shock and provocation. For instance, his short Down to the Cellar (1983) and his first feature film Alice (1988) were inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When asked about the reasons for being drawn to this classic text of English literature, Švankmajer (1987, p. 51) provocatively replied because ‘Carroll is an illustration of the fact that children are better understood by paedophiles than by pedagogues.’

⁷ For more information about attempts to overcome this crisis through joint publications see Hames (1995b, pp. 102–103).

⁸ In his discussion of Moscow's support for nationalist sentiments in the Eastern Bloc—which was but a smokescreen concealing the Soviet interest in keeping its dominions nicely compartmentalised and isolated from one another— Norman Davies (1997, p. 1107) extended this observation to all spheres of life in the Eastern Bloc: ‘East Europeans were often more familiar with life in Western Europe or the USA than with their immediate neighbours.’

⁹ Many scholars consider Švankmajer's preference for animation serendipitous. Hames (1995a) has suggested that had he been making feature live action films Švankmajer's film career—interrupted for eight years during Husák's ‘normalisation’—would have been much more difficult. During the fifties feature films were ‘subjected to close observation’, whereas ‘less ideological pressure was exerted’ in the area of animation (Hames, 1995a, p. 25). Švankmajer, however, pointed out that during the twenty year period of Stalinist repression following the Prague Spring, when he started making films, ‘animated film began to receive the same scrutiny as feature and documentary films’ (Hames, 1995b, p. 99).

¹⁰ There are a few notable exceptions, such as the blockbuster Disney productions, which Michael Gould (1976, p. 135) deemed the ‘ultimate example’ of surrealist sensibility; of course, he conveniently ignored the economic dimensions of their production and their implications for surrealist politics. A more compelling example is the anime phenomenon, which Susan Napier (2001) considered the only economically viable alternative to Hollywood—and one which initially developed precisely because it was cheaper to produce.

¹¹ For a more detailed discussion of Freud's account of the uncanny and critical responses to it see Chapter 1, ‘Uncanny encounters’, in my Echo and Narcissus: Echolocating the Spectator in the Age of Audience Research (Petek, 2008).

¹² The work of Jirí Trnka can serve as another case in point, which can also help me flesh out the space of in betweeness discussed above in relation to Švankmajer. Trnka's last film, the animated short The Hand (1965) about the Artist coerced into manufacturing sculptures glorifying the sinister and despotic Hand, has been habitually interpreted as a ‘merciless political allegory’ of the misery of human, especially artistic, existence in a totalitarian society (Dutka, 2000). However, it is quite clear that the film's message is more complex. In his attempts to stifle the Artist's freedom, the Hand deploys not only the strategies of terror and violence associated with totalitarian regimes but also the enticing, eroticised scenarios of capitalist advertising, thus suggesting their fundamental affinity. The Artist faces not one but two, equally unacceptable, options: he could resign himself to producing agitprop on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain or he could try to escape the clutches of Stalinism and jump out of the frying pan straight into the fire of Western consumption and entertainment. What makes Trnka's film particularly poignant is his decision to mobilise, rather than avoid, the darker connotations of his (and Švankmajer's) preferred means of expressions—puppetry and animation. The Hand, embodying both the Scylla (Stalinism) and the Charybdis (consumerism) of the Artist's predicament, cannot be seen simply as the film's villain bringing about the downfall of the filmmaker's noble alter ego, the Artist. The film's antagonist has an even more intimate and potentially compromising connection with the filmmaker; the Hand is the hand of the animator, the hand of the puppeteer. This heightened degree of self-reflexivity enables Trnka to avoid the pitfalls of the Artist's situation. By projecting himself not only onto the film's hero but also onto its antagonist, Trnka assumes responsibility for his actions as a filmmaker while refusing to convey his message in a didactic manner. He foregrounds the impossibility for the artist or the medium to remain aesthetically, economically or ideologically innocent, while he also refuses to see the only way out in an aesthetic, economic or political sell-out. Like Švankmajer with his puppets, Trnka inhabits an enabling space in between indoctrination and commodification.

¹³ The Velvet Revolution refers to the non-violent revolution of 1989, when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia relinquished power and announced the end of the single party system (Davies, 1997, p. 1123).

¹⁴ It should be noted, however, that with his latest film Lunacy Švankmajer has returned to more offbeat modes of address, smaller box office returns and more limited theatrical distribution. Ironically, this has been accompanied by a sigh of relief from his Western fans (cf. Pirodsky, 2005), who seem to believe that only such films can be oppositional or subversive.

¹⁵ Interestingly, this layer of the film is also shot through with references to surrealist classics, such as Un Chien Andalou (1929), as if to suggest a parallel between their now canonical status and the enthusiastic reception of Švankmajer in the West.

¹⁶ I am usingGerard Genette's terminology (1997). For a detailed account of the subversive effects of mise-en-abîme and its links to the uncanny see Chapter 11, ‘Mise-en-abîme, or a case of mistaken identity’, in my Echo and Narcissus: Echolocating the Spectator in the Age of Audience Research (Petek, 2008).

¹⁷ Švankmajer seems to be aware of this, although he downplays the political connotations and emphasises the magical ones: ‘What is it about Arcimboldo's methods that holds such an irresistible fascination for me that I do not even shrink from imitation I otherwise so despise? Is it, perhaps, that profound mark of Prague Mannerism …? My weakness for Rudolfine Mannerism is well known: my relation to Prague, Rudolf II and the fateful impression of the Rudolfine era on every stone of this city and the enduring radiation of this magical atmosphere through the ages’ (Hames, 1995b, p. 108).

¹⁸ Communicating Vessels is the title of Breton's book (1932), which has since been appropriated as the title of the 2007 exhibition in the University Gallery of the University of Essex (UK). The exhibition foregrounded the collaborative nature of the work of Jan Švankmajer and his wife Eva Švankmajerová, which has been routinely neglected in the auteur-driven analyses of Švankmajer's films.