Jan Svankmajer - J.S. Bach Fantasia in G Minor (1965)

Jan Švankmajer (born 4 September 1934 in Prague) is a Czech surrealist artist. His work spans several media. He is known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Quay and many others. Švankmajer has gained a reputation over several decades for his distinctive use of stop-motion technique, and his ability to make surreal, nightmarish and yet somehow funny pictures. He is still making films in Prague at the time of writing. Švankmajer's trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses very sped-up sequences when people walk and interact. His movies often involve inanimate objects coming alive and being brought to life through stop-motion. Food is a favourite subject and medium. Stop-motion features in most of his work, though his feature films also include live action to varying degrees. A lot of his movies, like the short film Down to the Cellar, are made from a child's perspective, while at the same time often having a truly disturbing and even aggressive nature. In 1972 the communist authorities banned him from making films, and many of his later films were banned. He was almost unknown in the West until the early 1980s. Today he is one of the most celebrated animators in the world. His best known works are probably the feature films Alice (1988), Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), Little Otik (2000) and Lunacy (2005), a surreal comic horror based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade. Also famous (and much imitated) is the short Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), which shows Arcimboldo-like heads gradually reducing each other to bland copies ("exhaustive discussion"); a clay man and woman who dissolve into one another sexually, then quarrel and reduce themselves to a frenzied, boiling pulp ("passionate discourse"); and two elderly clay heads who extrude various objects on their tongues (toothbrush and toothpaste; shoe and shoelaces, etc.) and use them in every possible combination, sane or otherwise ("factual conversation"). His films have been called "as emotionally haunting as Kafka's stories[1]." He was married to Eva Švankmajerová, an internationally known surrealist painter, ceramicist and writer until her death in October of 2005. She collaborated on several of his movies including Faust, Otesánek and Alice. They had two children, Veronika and Václav.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Jan
• Svankmajer
• J.S.
• Bach
• Fantasia
• in
• Minor
• 1965

[TheMasterDramon]

Me di cuenta de que mestoi llenando de agujeros y me quedan pocas ventanas para escapar de ellos, pero estos mismos forman un escape, solo que mas obtuso y me cuesta salir facilmente. Me pueden condenar a una vida entera dentro de mi mismo pero compartida con muchas otras personas, como la vida real pero sin la libertad, todo por mandarme una graaan cagada, pero quizas se solucione. Mientras tanto pensare la forma de entrar por los agujeros y no salir de mi cabeza bruscamente.

[AliceMoving]

This is the only animation I've ever seen that does Bach justice.

[Gamer6200]

3:53 O_O

[katiereichert26]

Only about 4% of the total population does have a "synaesthetic bone." "Schizophrenic" is an abused term in academia, as well as the notion of synaesthesia. Let's all quit being pompous and just enjoy the work of Svankmajer, which is enjoyable and not so entirely formal, just as Bach is not one or the other entirely intense...is on occasion very subtle.

[Lordisuckswangs]

some of the best sound effects in cinema

[Lele91pw]

Holes! Holes everywhere!!! Aaaaaargh!!!! They are frightening!!! XD

[manthasagittarius]

Look at the images around 6:42 and following -- the music changes to a deep progression that opens and opens harmonically and across the organ registers, and the images become a series of opening and further opening doors and hatches. There is the deepest sense that visual and auditory are one and the same. Awe-inspiring.

[manthasagittarius]

@skydrake3 Either you don;t know what schizophrenia really is, or you don't have a synaesthetic bone in your body. This is far too coherent, and the progression of images as the music unfolds is far too well matched thematically and even rhythmically, to suggest that kind of fragmented loss of reality grip. This piece is brilliant. Got enough synaesthesia in you to recognize that this has a taste too -- the purest dark bitter chocolate -- formal, intense, lingering.

[bellinhavet]

Disturbing.

[bellinhavet]

Disturbing.