Jan Svankmajer - Virile Games Pt:1 (1988)

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
• Virile
• Games
• Pt:1
• (1988)

[kiuhy7]

come on ref, i barely touched him!

[witgenstein69]

JA, JA, JA, JAJAJAJAJ A.... GENIAL

[MrRedrum91]

The music?

[PRT94321Anxious6s]

When I watched this in my class, I laughed so hard but everyone was so freakin dead serious. I'm so embarrassed! X(

[Katastrophiies]

Watched this in my animation class the other day and it creeped me out so so so much. Everyone was laughing and I honestly had no idea what I was watching.

[6rr7uyg]

wh......wha....what??

[alanboro]

Celebrity Deathmatch´s grandady

[sqccccccccc]

@sqccccccccc It's only after Hillsborough that people had seats. People would get killed.

It also picks fun at a system on the point to explode with bottled up violence. With the ending bum scene it feels like some sort of Freudian "distraction".

[sqccccccccc]

To understand why this is so violent you have to remember it was made before the Hillsborough incident.

[dimmuGABORgir]

und ich dachte imemr grizzly rage sei der schlechteste Film aller Zeiten

[wowelite2]

Wow.. my mind is so fucked up right now :/

[scorpion6782]

The players all look the same, they kind of just accept the death, only the last couple do anything about it by fighting back, perhaps this is a symbolism of best for last?