ARTICULO SWANKMAJER

With Jan Svankmajer’s universe already explored in a complete and suggestive biography, there is little left to say. It is always better to keep quiet than reuse worn-out redundant, insignificant words: writing without reason. What follows is an assembly, a collage maybe, of other (properly documented) people’s analysis and the opinions of the artist himself, spiced with a few brief comments, to be seen as examples and not explanations. All the rest, transversal writing, light and shadows… is in he book.

The text in question

“The representation of the body in Jan Svankmajer’s works is linked to the texts about power. Svankmajer contemplates the human condition as the subject of a growing state of currents and disorder; the body is the place in which humanity projects its desires, fears and uncertainties (…). This vision of the body is right in the middle of those other reasonings that combine surrealism with the conditions of postmodernism”.

1 In Spiklenci Slati (“Conspirators of Pleasure”), undoubtedly one of his major works, Svankmajer proposes a fertile game whose main rule is the playful and sensual use of the body. The referred to conspirators are conscious characters, with a pure sensibility, in their desire to cling on to passion who find in libidinous discourse an infinite catalogue of the body’s possibilities. As the critic Jordi Costa puts it, “when Jan Svankmajer draws a map, geography can be organic”.

2 If the perverse use of the human form has been constant in animated cinema –from cartoon aesthetic to the most avant-garde and daring compositions, sometimes bordering video-dance-, Svankmajer makes this potential perversity his main source of inspiration. Some of his works that are elegies to the unsteadiness of body: Moznosti dialogu (Dimensions of Dialogue), in which bodies flow through and nonsensical conversation that mixes the humours and tact of organic matter with the unconscious, Muzne hry (Male Games), in which the bodies of football players are the basis for an aggressive never-ending manipulation, Otesánek, in which an object, by nature inanimate, occupies the mental space of a body, or Jídlo (Food), in which bodies are only machines serving an oppressive social structure. Bodies spied upon –in Tichi tyden v dome (A Quiet Week in the House)-, bodies under aggression –in Byt (The Apartment)-, bodies tortured –in the aforementioned Muzne hry-, bodies fragmented –in Tma-svetlo-tma (Darkness-Light-Darkness)-, bodies dissipated; these are the headings of the last chapter of Charles Jodoin-Keaton’s study, Le Cinema de Jan Svankmajer: Une surréalisme animée.

3. In other words, bodies displayed.

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