23 MAY — 02 JUNE 2024

23 MAY — 02 JUNE 2024

Athanor: The Alchemical Furnace

Adam Ol'ha, Jan Daňhel

Slovakia / Czech Republic

2020, 117'

Jan Švankmajer is the subject of this documentary, which honors his cinematographic work and his mastery, with whom the filmmakers spent three years distilling thoughts on topics such as his fetishes or his views on humanity. It is a three-pronged film, which needs two structural blocks of Švankmajer’s life: Jaromír Kallista, his producer, and Eva Švankmajerová, his wife and muse, who appears in the film through the doors of memory, dreams, and archives.

Retrospective

SCREENINGS

April 29, Saturday, 15:30 (117')

Cinemateca Portuguesa, Room Félix Ribeiro • C.156

INFO

ORIGINAL TITLE

Athanor - Alchymická pec

LANGUAGE

Czech

SUBTITLES

Portuguese / English

SHARE

SAME SECTION MOVIES

A Game with Stones

Clocks and stones in a symphony to the sound of a xylophone, in a stop motion animation in black and white.

Jan Švankmajer

1965, 8'

A Quiet Week in the House

There is a dilapidated house in the countryside that has become the obsession of a man who decides to spend a week there, trying to peek into the various corners of the house and the surreal way in which the objects that inhabit it behave.

Jan Švankmajer

1969, 13'

Alice

Adaptation of Alice’s adventures by Lewis Carroll, mixing live action with stop motion animation, and Jan Švankmajer’s first leap into feature film. The inspiration for the film came from wanting to remove the material from the webs of the fairy tale and bring Alice more into the realm of dreams, without the weight of morals and with the freedom and bizarreness practicable in the realm of fantasy.

Jan Švankmajer

Switzerland / United Kingdom / West Germany / Czechoslovakia

1987, 84'

Animated Self-Portraits (segment Svankmajer)

A challenge between colleagues: David Ehrlich, an animator, asks others (from Japan to Yugoslavia) to make their own portrait with the tools they use, and Jan Švankmajer’s answer is this film.

Jan Švankmajer

1989, 1'

Conspirators of Pleasure

A very dark comedy about a group of people, more or less connected in their daily lives, who satisfy their more or less extravagant fantasies and sensual rituals, from the use of a chicken suit to a predilection for bread balls.

Jan Švankmajer

Czech Republic / Switzerland / United Kingdom

1996, 83'

Darkness-Light-Darkness

A human body under reconstruction that tries to understand where each component belongs.

Jan Švankmajer

1989, 10'

Dimensions of Dialogue

A surrealist animation about the inherent difficulties of human communication, in which clay bodies are transmuted in the most incredible ways.

Jan Švankmajer

1982, 11'

Don Juan

Don Juan seen through the lens of traditional Czech plays. In this film, huge puppets represent the classic story of the Spanish libertine.

Jan Švankmajer

1970, 30'

Down to the Cellar

All a girl’s fears catch up with her when she goes down to the basement.

Jan Švankmajer

1982, 14'

Et cetera

Minimalist figures perform a series of fantastic acrobatics, such as learning how to use wings to fly.

Jan Švankmajer

1966, 8'

Faust

Claymation, puppets, stop motion. All elements thrown like clay on the surrealist wall to create a version of Faust’s story and his dance with Lucifer that brings together elements of Goethe and Christopher Marlowe, as well as some traditional folklore and even a Kafkaesque visit to a Portuguese court.

Jan Švankmajer

Czech Republic / France / United Kingdom / Germany

1994, 90'

Flora

A creature made of perishable fruits and vegetables, decomposing so close to a regenerating glass of water.

Jan Švankmajer

1989, 0'

Historia Naturae (Suita)

Each portrait of an animal species — and there are eight in total — is made with different animation methods, drawings and real images.

Jan Švankmajer

1967, 10'

Hugh Cornwell: Another Kind of Love

Jan Švankmajer makes the video for the song “Another Kind of Love” by Hugh Cornwell. A light piece of music in contrast with the unsettling aesthetics of the Czech director.

Jan Švankmajer

United Kingdom / West Germany / Czechoslovakia

1988, 4'

Insects

Jan Švankmajer thought that this would be his last film. An adaptation of a satirical theater comedy by brothers Karel and Josef Čapek, it follows a drifter narrator who falls asleep in a forest and dreams of anthropomorphized insects, in an allegory of life after the First World War. Švankmajer’s adaptation is a metatextual narrative about an amateur staging of the play, blended with the process of making the film itself.

Jan Švankmajer

Czech Republic / Slovakia

2018, 98'

Jabberwocky

Even before his feature film Alice, Jan Švankmajer takes Lewis Carroll’s imagery and adapts the poem Jabberwocky, a creature that appears in Through the Looking-Glass.

Jan Švankmajer

1971, 12'

Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasy in G minor

Doors, windows and stone walls with cracks in an intense symphony to the sound of Bach.

Jan Švankmajer

1965, 8'

Kunstkamera

Possibly Jan Švankmajer’s last film and his last collaboration with producer Jaromír Kallista — who considers that, after this, there is nothing else they can film. This is an idiosyncratic look, as all of Švankmajer’s work, on his own collection of suis generis objects and artifacts that piqued interest among the director’s fans when it was glimpsed in the documentary Athanor: The Alchemical Furnace.

Jan Švankmajer

2022, 114'

Leonardo ́s diary

Paintings by Leonardo da Vinci are interspersed with live-action images, which, seeming disparate, are strangely associated.

Jan Švankmajer

Czechoslovakia / Italy

1972, 10'

Little Otik

Jan Švankmajer’s affection for fairy-tale characters of macabre tones is present in this adaptation of a Czech folklore story, between Pinocchio and the Little Red Riding Hood, about a couple desiring to have a baby who find an anthropomorphic trunk that turns out to possess an insatiable hunger. The consequences turn out to be eccentric, yet still (very darkly) humorous.

Jan Švankmajer

Czech Republic / United Kingdom / Japan

2000, 127'