"Jan Svankmajer is known mainly as a director, screenwriter and art director." "Equally significant, however, is his fine art." "A light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention" "I presertly recognised it as that of Usher" "'And you have not seen it?" "'" "Thus speaking and having carefully shaded his lamp he hurried to one of the casements and threw it freely open to the storm" "He has created objects, collages, prints, numerous texts and screenplays, manuals for tactile acts resulting from tactile experimentation." "Surrealism is not an art." "Surrealism is a certain attitude to life, to the world." "And that has always been very much in line with my view of art." "Frankly, I'm not really interested in art as a specific human activity." "There are more interesting activities than art." "I am interested in the imagination." "An important watershed for Svankmajer was the turning away from orthodox lnformel and Rudolfinian Mannerism in the mid-1 960s." "I was intrigued by the object... as a technique, the three-dimensional object, not sculpture, but an object created through assemblage, using fragments of reality and so on." "Of course this led to Arcimboldo." "The accumulation of objects which together create something else." "The metamorphosis of a human head or human figure is simply fascinating." "My fine artwork is very closely linked to my films." "It is either directly based on them, or else it anticipates them." "For Historia Naturae, 1967, and following on from that, I made a whole series of collages, prints and objects based on fantasy zoology." "On the other hand my tactile experimentation anticipated my films, such as The Fall of the House of Usher or one episode of Dimensions of Dialogue and, of course, Conspirators of Pleasure" "VVa SVVakmaeeoVVáS poa t gS aVVe a ceoeoS VVe eect on those societies where consumerism is floundering." "There is hidden mockery under the traditional as well as modernist perception of beauty." "Those who resist a dumbing down can easily grasp the secret of these games." "ALENA NÁDVORNiKOVÁV Her paintings, initially falsely naive, from very early on, as early as the '60s, assume a very individual character in terms of how the painter takes ownership of and interprets... and interpretation is important with Svankmajer and surrealism in general" "..interprets through old techniques that are utterly inartistic objects hidden in the pictures, the so-called Suchbilder" "So the paintings are illusory in that they are perfectly painted in terms of technique." "She uses an illusory, smooth style." "Often there are what look like braids of material and cosmic substances, flying and getting tangled up, which reflect a very..." "how can I put it?" "..a far from idyllic side to the world as she sees it." "In the early '70s Jan Svankmajer embarked on an extensive project." "It was a crazy project aimed at creating a kind of encyclopaedia of an alternative world." "I bought old Meyer's and Brockhouse Lexicons, which cost peanuts in those days, and I started cutting and pasting over the pages creating a sort of new picture encyclopaedia, or Bilderlexikon" "Svankmajer's Bilderlexikon." "I started with zoology and then went on to work on botany." "Then I moved over to architecture, anthropology, geography, geology and technology." "And as it grew in volume - l created dozens of collages - l realised this work could actually take up a lifetime." "To me, animation is like magic." "It's not about making things move, but making things live." "This is the domain of magic." "And that is what I have always tried to achieve in my films - not just to move objects, but to breathe life into them and explore their inner being." "The common denominator to what I do is the game." "It is, of course, a gamble." "These are all gambling games." "All children's games are." "You have to gamble everything, you can't just toy with it."