Jan Švankmajer

Biography

Jan Švankmajer’s father was a window dresser and his mother a seamstress. The home puppet theatre came to him at Christmas when he was eight (by other accounts, nine); he gradually made the puppets and sets himself. Later he said that marionettes had become firmly embedded in his personality and that he turns to them when he feels threatened by the outside world.

He was born on 4 September 1934 in Prague.

In 1950–1954 he studied stage design at the Higher School of Applied Arts in Prague under Richard Lander, making puppets and sets there. Then, in 1954–1958, he studied directing and stage design in the puppetry department of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts. By his own account, the school was liberal even under the harsh Stalinist regime, and banned books on modern French art circulated among the students. At the end of his studies, on a trip to Poland, he saw reproductions of Paul Klee for the first time. His fellow students included Aleš Veselý, Jan Svoboda and the future director Juraj Herz. While still a student he staged the folk play “Don Juan” at the D 34 theatre, and in his graduation production, Carlo Gozzi’s “The King Stag”, he combined puppets with live actors in masks. In 1958 he took part as a puppeteer in Emil Radok’s short film “Johannes Doctor Faust”, then worked briefly as a director and designer at the puppet theatre in Liberec. From 1958 to 1960 he did military service in Mariánské Lázně, where he drew a great deal.

In 1960 he founded the Theatre of Masks, a troupe attached to the Semafor theatre; during the first production he met Eva Dvořáková, his future wife. In 1962 Semafor dissolved the troupe, and it moved to the Laterna Magika, where Švankmajer led a black theatre ensemble until 1964. His drawings, shown in the corridor of Semafor, were seen by Vlastimil Beneš and Zbyněk Sekal, who invited him to join the Máj 57 group.

His first short film, “The Last Trick of Mr. Schwarcewallde and Mr. Edgar”, appeared in 1964. It already contains what would continue: sharp editing and a live actor beside animated objects. The film was noticed abroad, and in the following years Švankmajer made short films mixing puppet theatre, animation and live action. He made “Playing with Stones” (1965) almost alone, in Austria, with Eva and the cinematographer Petr Puluj. In 1968 he signed the manifesto “Two Thousand Words”, a public appeal for democratic reform; after the Warsaw Pact troops entered Czechoslovakia in August, the family emigrated to Austria, where he made “Picnic with Weissmann”, but they returned in 1969. In 1968 he also received the Max Ernst Prize at the Oberhausen festival for “Historia naturae”. In 1970 he and Eva joined the Czech surrealist group around Vratislav Effenberger and took part in its samizdat (privately circulated, unofficial) anthologies.

At the start of the “normalisation” (the hard-line political regime that followed 1968) came “The Garden”, “The Flat”, “A Quiet Week in the House”, “The Ossuary” and “Don Juan”, in which marionettes are played by actors with wires on their papier-mâché heads. “The Garden” and “The Flat” were shelved. In 1972–1979 he was banned from filming: he refused a compromise over the editing of “The Castle of Otranto”. He worked as a designer and special-effects maker at Barrandov Studios (for Oldřich Lipský and Juraj Herz), did stage design for theatres, including the Drama Club, and from 1976 made ceramics with Eva under the pseudonym Kostelec. In 1981 the couple bought a dilapidated castle in Horní Stankov and gradually turned it into a cabinet of curiosities, which holds both their own works and collections, including art from Africa and Polynesia.

After the ban he adapted Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope”. In 1983 a retrospective of his work of the 1960s at Annecy drew international attention. “Dimensions of Dialogue” won the Grand Prix and the critics’ prize, and the same year the Golden Bear at the Berlinale; Terry Gilliam counts this film among the ten best animated films of all time. At home, however, the film was shown to the ideological committee of the Communist Party’s Central Committee as a deterrent example, and at the Short Film studio Švankmajer was once more not allowed to work. He went to Bratislava, made “Down to the Cellar”, and published in samizdat, in five copies, the book “Touch and Imagination” on his tactile experiments.

He found the money for “Alice” abroad. The state held a monopoly on film production, the studios refused, and he turned to the producer Jaromír Kallista. The film was shot in 1987, mostly at the Swiss studio Condor Films, was released in 1988, and won the prize for best animated feature at Annecy. In 1990 came “The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia”, in 1992 “Food”. With Kallista he bought a former cinema in Knovíz and founded the Athanor studio.

Then came “Faust” (1994) with Petr Čepek, “Conspirators of Pleasure” (1996), “Little Otik” (2000, the Czech Lion for best film), “Lunacy” (2005) and “Surviving Life” (2010). Eva Švankmajerová died a few weeks before the premiere of “Lunacy”, and she was awarded a Czech Lion posthumously for the visual concept. In 2009 Švankmajer received the Crystal Globe for outstanding contribution to world cinema at Karlovy Vary. “Insects” (2018) remains, so far, his last feature film. He consistently rejects honours awarded by the state: in 1989 he turned down the title of Merited Artist, and in the 1990s the French Order of Arts and Letters.