"Jan Svankmajer is a Czech filmmaker, krown for his animation." "THE SVANKMAJERS' imaginings" "Jan Svankmajer's work goes beyond filmmaking." "For more than 30 years he has worked with his wife Eva, and their work is inseparable from their life." "Engraving, painting, collage, ceramics, invention of objects and animals, puppets, poetry and so on." "They work in many different media, but always as a response to surrealism." "As secret members of the surrealist group in communist Prague, since the Velvet Revolution they have beer working tirelessly." "Last winter they interrupted work on their new film Little Otik, to organise an exhibition showing their body of work." "HUMAN ANATOMY" "NATURAL history" "And over there are the collages." "Yes, those are the collages." "Some of them are new, some are of disjointed anatomy." " But those are new things?" " Yes, also." "I found inexpensive, second-hand anatomical atlases." "I couldn't resist cutting them up." "Although it's a bit..." "Some objects travel from one film to another or from another art form to a film or conversely from a film to another art form." "I think there is only one sort of poetry and that the form of expression of that poetry is not that important, whether it's film, painting, engraving, collage or ceramics." "It's professional laziness to only use one form of expression." "In that respect I consider myself to be a militant surrealist." "The Felaceus Oedipus or 'false Oedipus' is an extremely rare species found on the edge of the Australian bush." "Its neck extends from a giant elastic pouch," "A bony thorax rises from the upperpart of the neck." "The Australian Aborigenes call the bird 'Maca Samambo', which means 'giver of sons'." "They believe that if a pregnant woman eats one of its eggs,, she will give birth to a son." "And the Felaceus Oedipus' eggs hatch into male chicks, which are born penis first." "There was once a man and a woman who didn't have any children, which made them very urhappy." "One day the man went into the forest and there he found a root in the shape of a little boy." "He took it back to his wife and they called it Otesánek" "We are cutting various shapes of Otesánek's body for different stages of the animation." "We need the legs to have different positions, the branches as legs in different positions so we can make them move as Otesánek moves." "And what's that for?" "That's to animate the facial expressions." "We choose different shapes with different orifices because afterwards they become eyes or teeth, orifices where light disappears." "We want to make Otesánek's expressions out of real pieces of wood." "There are still lots of Otesáneks to be made here." "For example, this piece of wood has a lovely penis." "We have chosen to create the movement in different stages." "There are some with their legs apart, others with one leg or with both legs together." "And we're going to film all that in sequences of two images to create movement." "We made this one sitting down so the mother can hold it in her arms." "For the animation, they will be done differently, clothed and made of lead wire." "Fingers and hands will be animated, the legs and head will move." "This stage is between that one - its legs are closer together which is good   and this stage." "I think we should have enough stages." "If we add the two completed Otesáneks we have over there, I think that should be enough." "I'll chop it into pieces!" "You've gone mad!" "You've gone mad. I won't let you." "Martin, there's one there on that side." "There on that side." "A feature of these pine roots is that they look like little fingers." "We're going to use them to make Otesánek's fingers and toes." "So we've come here to look for fingers and toes." "The roots can go up and then disappear." "We can start." "The shoulder!" "is it going?" "Otesánek!" "We're using classical techniques to animate Little Otik" "We're going to combine animation in close-up shots with techniques using puppets on nylon strings." "And we're going to combine that with shots where someone is inside Otesánek with gloves made like little roots." "He moves his hands, his fingers, the roots." "So we combine those classical techniques." "That's the best way because... because before the spectator can grasp how each picture is made the technique changes again." "So he's been tricked and can't work out how we did it." "If you move something when animating the roots, you'll have to work with it... ls it more difficult to animate real wood than latex?" "In some ways it's a bit more complicated but on the other hand, the material implies its own movement so, in a sense, the material cooperates." "It's not the stylisation of an object." "So it's more difficult." "But I prefer it because it's kind of natural." "Animating Otesánek is physically demanding!" "Leave that" "Don't do that" "Why don't you listen to me?" "Don't tear it." "What did I tell you?" "What do you think of computer animation?" "I haven't used it so far." "What I've seen up to now seems to be very cold, very technical, very distant." "All that I've needed to do up until now I have done using classical, manual techniques, including the film Food where the characters... are devouring the tables and chairs and we see their heads change." "All that was done with modelling clay." "It's not that I am a lover of the days gone by but I don't like these techniques because there's something missing." "It's too perfect." "The technique is too garish." "Whereas with manual animation, it's less precise." "There are lots of little imperfections and mistakes and for me mistakes are very important because they make the film subjective." "Like the ancient Hermeticists, I believe that objects have a life of their own." "And because they have witnessed certain events, or rather because they've been handled by people who were in a certain frame of mind, who were tense or anxious, and these objects have absorbed all that and in certain situations objects can convey what they have absorbed." "So based on what I feel they contain, I collect these objects and introduce them into my films." "THE CELLAR" "Places haunt me as much as themes." "One of the most haunting themes is the cellar." "I really suffered as a child when I had to go down there." "The cellar in Alice and of course in Little Otik too, is the cellar from my childhood." "There was a cellar like that in our block of flats in Vrsovice." "My mother sent me down to the cellar to fetch coal when I was older and before that to fetch potatoes." "It was, of course... a terrifying experience." "It was awful." "When my mother asked me to go down to the cellar for potatoes, I almost felt like running away from home." "But at the same time, it fed my imagination." "Why did you choose to use a little girl to represent your fear?" "It didn't feel right to use a little boy in that role because I thought that my anxiety was linked to the feminine side that exists in a man." "So I decided to replace myself with a sort of childlike incarnation of my spirit." "These objects are from the film Alice" "There you have croissants with nails and these are eggs with skulls." "It's marinated in something." "Some eggs are probably bad and if we were to uncork the bottle, it would stink." "Look, it's rotten there." "That's from the film Alice" "This is classic putrefaction." "These are the shoes worn by the cameraman on Alice" "They've been in here since 1986." "It's hermetically sealed and they're slowly rotting inside." "We're going to put this one here and the other one against the wall." "Here are the king and queen." "Eva has depicted herself as the wicked queen." "Off with their heads!" "' ordered the Queen." "This is the March Hare and this is the Mad Hatter." "They're the characters in Alice" "Eva made the hare and I made this one." "creative dialogue" "Can it be washed?" "It can't. I can scrub it but water won't clean it." "All along I carry an idea about the film." "I also have an idea and of where l come in, what I will do." "I try my hardest to understand what Jan wants." "I don't know how to copy." "I have my own personal expression." "I've had it for years..." "Of course, I give Eva free reign." "What I want from her is within the framework of her own thinking, her own creativity." "She fits in without forcing herself." "I can't say to her, 'l want that redder,' or 'bigger'." "Eva did a lot of work as a painter on The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope." "She made the moving wall, the panels which represent hell and push the condemned into the abyss." "To sum up the collaborative process," "Eva has her own creative programme." "She is a painter, she writes prose and poetry." "We work independently of each other." "We are linked by surrealism but that's another matter." "Once I broke one because people was watching me." "I needed them to go away, so that I did not have to see them seeing me." "Leave me alone." "I can see you're very good at group sex!" "Oh, no!" "Once someone I knew invited me to an orgy and I got such a shock that he never suggested it again." "They are placed around the outside." " That's impossible." " Leave it." "I'll position that one." "If you numbered them they must..." "You'll break it." "That's not the way." "That's number five. lt can't go there." "But this one belongs here." "OK, OK." "This one fits in here." "You'll break it." "That's number two. lt goes there." "I put them wrong yesterday." "Right..." "Wait!" "You're messing it up." "Again." "Take them all off." "We'll have to start again." "That one should be in front." "Eva." "Shouldn't they be the other way round?" "What?" "That one should be in front and that one behind." "That one has to be in front." "I prefer not to see it." "Well, put some cloth over it." "We're always trying to say something to each other." "We're always curious of what the other's attitude will be... how they will react." "It broadens the perspective." "There we go." "At last." "Why do you sign your ceramics E and J?" "The initials E and J distinguish between things made by Jan and by me." "We work with the same materials, we share the same life but we express ourselves differently, not in terms of ideas... nor in terms of our interpretation of life, but the art we create is different." "Our work is not interchangeable." "How did you work together on Little Otik?" "Eva really liked the story of 'Otesánek'." "She wanted to make it into an animated film and she wrote a script." "I tried to dissuade her but Eva was already working on it, and because of the transfer of thought processes that passes between two people who live together... I was very sceptical to start with about the idea of making a film of a fairytale." "Then suddenly I found myself thinking also about the subject." "It started taking shape in my head." "And I said to myself, 'Christ, I can't steal this idea from Eva.'" "But I had delved so deeply into the subject that I couldn't stop developing it further." "I was presented with a dilemma and I didn't know what to do." "So I admitted to her that I wanted to work on 'Otesánek' too." "She got a bit angry." "Then we realised that there was no conflict of interests and that we could incorporate her film in mine." "One morning the man dug up a little tree stump in the forest." "It looked like a little child." "He just had to cut the roots into hands and legs." "These are the preliminary sketches for the animation of Little Otik" "Here's Otesánek in the house." "And that's the old woman who cuts his stomach open." "But the ohd womar was quick" "She took her hoe and with one blow split Otesánek's stomach open" "These are the different stages for the father when he sees the mother being wolfed down." "That's what it look s like." "Then I put it on a lit table... I light it so I can copy the different stages of the image, with the agreement of the film's director." "But the director is unavailable at the moment because he's looking after the actors." "These are our children's things." "The little hat, the panties." "All of it." " And look, this one has little buttocks." " Look at the little bottom!" "He has all he needs." "We've come here to look for the film's protagonist." "I know what I need to look for." "Good." "I have a photograph of Eva at that age." "We're looking for a girl like her for the film." "I don't know if we'll find her." "It's Jan who's looking for that." "I don't know how he knows what I looked like as a child because I'm different now." "Perhaps he has seen photos?" "But it's him who's looking for that." "When the photos are ready, Jan's going to take them." "Then he's going to sit in a chair and complain." "You're going to say to him, 'You've wet yourself again." "Can't you warn me?" "'" "You have to warn me" "You mustn't do that" "She's very expressive." "Yes, she's perfect." "She's the best." "She doesn't look older there." "She's a big girl." "She could be..." "You should be ashamed of yourself Who's going to wash that?" "Bed-wetter" "He's going to hurl himself at you and you must be waving your arms about." "He will be fighting with him, won't he?" "He is crawling like this into the bed." "This way so that you can stretch them." "How?" "Against him." "Like that." "Against him." "Yes." "THE PERFECT PALACE" "Tuesday 17 July" "My cameraman and his wife Anna came to our house in Stankov." "Having done a tour of the castle, Anna made the following observation:" "'You're transforming Stankov into a puppet theatre'." "She had a point." "I think what we had done with Stankov was an amazing feat in its own way." "I hope we will have the courage to see it through." "We need to build something somewhere between Kuks Castle and the postman Cheval's Perfect Palace - a kind of surrealist home for sages." "It's going to need ever more concertration and more intersive work." "We should draw up a plan for the finished project." "Ever at the stage it's at row," "Ithinkit couldbea project that will take your breath away." "But I don't know what to do." "It's terribly neglected." "Why do you surround yourself with statues?" "That's a stupid question." "How can you live without statues?" "Without trees, without water?" "Perhaps because life without sculptures is meaningless." "Perhaps because sculptures, like trees and things that last, are essential to life." "I can't say why I put statues somewhere." "I can't." "Why is Jan fascinated by Arcimboldo?" "I can't answer that." "You'll have to ask him." "Today I spent all day in the studio making a new Arcimboldo." "It's terrible but I find this activity as exciting as ever, and I'll probably never understand why." "surrealism against THE tide" "At the end of the '60s, especially with the Prague Spring, we were able to organise one or two exhibitions and publish a few things." "Then with the Soviet occupation the group went back underground." "Here there was a big table and we would sit here with the group." "The whole house was given over to our surrealist activities." "The whole house almost all the time." "There was always someone sleeping there." "We had meetings every week." "We did that for years, until the revolution." "Before, when we met in a cafe, we could be sure that at the third meeting, not the second but the third, that at the next table there would be a man in an raincoat drinking beer slowly," "without looking at us." "So we said, 'We can't talk here." "We'll meet at the house.'" "To a certain extent, we were against Stalinism as well as against other dissidents." "We were involved, we communicated with Havel, for example, and with dissidents who now hold political posts." "For 20 years we illegally created the real Czech culture." "When the totalitarian system came to an end, everyone dispersed." "Dissidents dispersed, the underground movement broke up, but the surrealist group stayed together." "In the '50s I had a manual and on the back page there was a portrait of Gottwald, who was the President of Czechoslovakia, as well as a portrait of Stalin." "For me these two men were personal enemies because they endangered my family and my future." "I come from a rich family and my only prospect was to become a chimney sweep... or a miner and something else like that." "I can't remember." "Equally ghastly." "I'm a hard worker, I don't mind crawling into a chimney or digging coal." "That's OK by me." "But what I objected to was the terrible... deculturisation of society and I felt despair at the idea that one day someone might wrestle my pencil or pen out of my hand." "I left school at 14 and said to myself that no-one would ever snatch my pen off me." "It was hard, but no-one ever did." "The regime has changed and for ten years people have been encouraged to be interested only in money." "It's the same thing." "Whenever I say I'm a surrealist I get pitying looks..." "People think, 'Those poor people who lived under communist rule, they don't know that surrealism is no longer fashionable.'" "They tolerate my declaration but as soon as we start discussing it," "especially with young people, they start getting interested because they understand there's more to it than Salvador Dalí's paintings." "Young people are interested in my films." "They realise that there's more to surrealism than they've learnt at school and been told about." "They say to themselves, 'lf that's what surrealism is, then it's not dead, because I'm interested in it.'" "FOOD" "I was a very thin child who needed to be fed constantly." "I was forced to eat, I was sent to camps to be fed." "The only aim of these camps was to force-feed kids." "It was terrible." "If a child put on a kilo in a week, they got a sweet." "So each week before we were weighed, we drank loads of water so as to put on a kilo." "Of course this was in collaboration with the political regime which was there to help everyone, including skinny children." "It was terrible." "We were kids separated from our families and we spent two months there at the hands of women who force-fed us constantly." "They even refused to put me in the top class because I was too thin." "I even ended up in a wheelchair because I couldn't walk any more." "It was a traumatic experience and of course I used it in my films." "The meal is naturally symbolic." "Food and eating are symbols of... human aggressiveness." "And yet it was only when I had finished writing the screenplay for Little Otik that I realised that the whole film was about my obsession with food." "Otik, drop that!" "Don't eat that!" "We're going to add a bit more bark to make it more realistic." "Then we'll do a close-up with the teeth." "But I don't have any rational control over my obsessions." "They behave in an irrational way and do what they want to do." "Otesánek could of course also represent our unconscious." "We know that fairytales start out as myths - either cosmic myths or social myths, but myths all the same." "Otesánek is definitely an archetype." "And that's what interests me, going to the root of what Otesánek embodied for people." "He's not just a monster who scares kids." "EROTlClSM" "Eva has made all these dolls." "They're the main characters for the film Conspirators of Pleasure" "Can you hold it there?" "This one's a travelling lady, like the inflatable dolls or the dummies that men get themselves in prisons." "Mr Pivoine, the character in the film, got himself a doll made in the image of his neighbour." "And she made a doll of him." "They play out their sadomasochistic relationship through these figurines." "Erotic fantasies are figments of the imagination and generally they aren't played out... at the level of what we view as sexuality." "These are purely imaginative perversions." "That's why I so meticulously, almost in a documentary-like fashion, record the lengthy preparation to show what people are willing to do to satisfy their erotic fantasies - what they're prepared to be subjected to." "It's clear that for lots of people television has become the only contact they have with the world, including with eroticism." "I don't know if it's the same in France, but there are erotic films on Czech television every Saturday night." "Television is the only contact a lot of people have with the real world and represents the only reality they know." "Clearly, it targets this type of civilisation, communication of a bawdy kind." "TACTlLlSM" "Tactile game" "We buy four wooden rolling pins." "We cover one half of a rolling pin with grains of uncooked rice and the other half with the scahes from a broken pine cone." "We get undressed and so as to heighten the sensibility of the skin on the stomach and thighs, we brush it with emery paper." "It's quite arousing." "And here... I'm touching a kitten." "I'm putting my hand in its mouth and it's licking me." "Touch is the first sense to develop in humans, even before they see or listen, they feel the mother's body." "So it is a very important sense which has never been shaped in an aesthetic form." "It hasn't been developed in the same way as sight or hearing, which have their own forms of art and poetry." "Watch that she doesn't bite." "And there..." "There I'm touching someone's nose." "Touch is always constrained by utilitarian functions." "I wanted to instigate new research with the aim of developing new possibilities for touch." "I wrote a tactile poem called 'Beside the Tactile Sea' because we are merely at the edge of this unexplored ocean." "That's how it's meant to be read." "There's a word, then a tactile element." "Then more words, then another tactile element, etc." "These are the tactile objects." "I call it the 'new eroticism'." "It's for autosexuality." "This is obviously how you use it." "And this one like this." "We know that in its utilitarian function sight is closely linked to touch." "So sight can serve as an intermediary for touch, through imagination, not in the natural world." "It opens up new opportunities." "That's what I used in Conspirators of Pleasure when they use tactile rolling pins." "I think many people through their eyes sensed the rolling pins as if they were being used on their own bodies, thanks to the imagination." "I see this as the future for tactile films, rather than handing out objects to be touched." "For me tactilism is something very sexual, terribly private..." "Jan has opened up a secret chamber and I have never fully come to terms with it." "Every time... it still shocks me." "I wrote the text before making the object." "First I expressed my feelings in words, the tactile impressions I would have had when I put my hand inside Eva." "In the bottom corner there will be pieces of broker glass, which mean that you heave Eva's portrait feelling wounded." "Have you touched your tactile portrait?" "I read the notes." "That was enough." "Imagine if there had been a mouse in there." "No, thank you." "Eva and Jan have just finished making Little Otík." "Already in the preparation an international exhibition with the various surrealist groups, a film about the life of the Marquis de Sade, several cartoons inspired by popular Czech fairytales, a fantasy crockery set, and busts and portraits of their friends," "a series of new tactile collages, the publication of a monograph and a collection of poems, an anthology of subversive literature, the conversion of an old barn into a gothic castle." "We'd like to thank everyone, particularly Eva Svankmajerová and Jan Svankmajer for their availability, kindness and patience throughout this project."