23 MAY — 02 JUNE 2024

23 MAY — 02 JUNE 2024

Surviving Life

Jan Švankmajer

Czech Republic / Japan / Slovakia

Fiction / Animation, 2010, 105'

A film that combines filmed reality and cut-out animation to tell the double life of a married man who meets the literal woman of his dreams, dreams that he manages to visit with the help of a ritual. As he learns more about his past, he will have to decide between staying in the dream world or the waking world.

Retrospective

SCREENINGS

May 03, Wednesday, 15:30 (105')

Cinemateca Portuguesa, Room Félix Ribeiro • C.721

INFO

ORIGINAL TITLE

Přežít svůj život

LANGUAGE

Czech

SUBTITLES

Portuguese / English

SCRIPT

Jan Švankmajer

CAST

Vaclav Helsus, Klara Issova, Zuzana Kronerova, Daniela Bakerova, Emilia Dosekova, Marcel Nemec

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jan Ruzicka, Juraj Galvanek

EDITING

Marie Zemanova

PRODUCER

Jaromír Kallista

SALES

Athanor [CZ] ([email protected])

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

Animation, 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

Animation, 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

Czechoslovakia / Switzerland / United Kingdom / West Germany

Fiction / Animation, 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

Animation, 1989, 1'

Athanor: The Alchemical Furnace

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.

Adam Ol'ha, Jan Daňhel

Slovakia / Czech Republic

Documentary, 2020, 117'

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

Fiction, 1996, 83'

Darkness-Light-Darkness

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

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 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

Animation, 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

Animation, 1970, 30'

Down to the Cellar

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

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1982, 14'

Et cetera

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

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 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

Fiction / Animation, 1994, 90'

Flora

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

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1989, 20''

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

Animation, 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

Animation, 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

Fiction / Animation, 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

Animation, 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

Animation, 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

Documentary, 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

Animation, 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

Fiction / Animation, 2000, 127'

Lunacy

After Alice in Wonderland and Faust, the Czech director takes two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, a dash of Marquis de Sade and builds a plot about a man that’s convinced to go to an asylum to undergo preventive, but shocking, therapy in order to overcome debilitating hallucinations where he imagines he’s being placed in a straitjacket.

Jan Švankmajer

Czech Republic / Slovakia

Fiction / Animation, 2005, 118'

Meat Love

Two pieces of meat fall in love and dance and are filled with flour. But it’s a quick-fry love story.

Jan Švankmajer

United Kingdom / USA / West Germany

Animation, 1989, 1'

Picnic with Weissmann

Several objects — some chairs, a chessboard, a balloon, among others — that are enjoying a beautiful sunny day, in the middle of nature.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1969, 13'

Punch and Judy

A classic in the traditional art of puppetry, where the male figure, Punch, “comically” fights with his wife, Judy. In this short film, they fight to the death.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1966, 10'

The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer

A tribute to Jan Švankmajer, where a puppet teaches a boy the art of perspective and the illusory trick.

Keith Griffiths, Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay

Animation, 1984, 14'

The Castle of Otranto

A forerunner in mockumentary art and an adaptation of Horace Walpole’s homonymous gothic novel.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1973, 17'

The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia

A film that Jan Švankmajer made for the BBC, when it asked for an animation about the situation in Czechoslovakia in 1990. Czech history from 1948 to 1989 is presented through clay figures that emerge from a bust of Stalin, open on an operating table.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1990, 10'

The Fall of the House of Usher

The imagery of Edgar Allan Poe and two cursed siblings (she is almost catatonic, he with his senses inflamed) is transported into the animated world of Jan Švankmajer.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1980, 15'

The Flat

A short film without dialogue where a man is trapped in his apartment and the objects around him are indignant against him.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1968, 13'

The Food

Jan Švankmajer invites us to think about our relationship with food in segments dedicated to the main meals of the day. How easy it is to devour each other.

Jan Švankmajer

United Kingdom / Czech Republic

Animation, 1992, 17'

The Garden

A fence that is made of people and of which Franta, who has come to visit his old friend Josef, will become a part of.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1968, 19'

The Last Trick

Jan Švankmajer’s first film, an animation about two mimes — Edgar and Schwarzwald, as flesh-and-blood actors and puppets — who try to perform increasingly extravagant tricks, fighting for the audience’s adoration.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1964, 10'

The Ossuary

A journey through the Sedlec Ossuary, one of the most famous Czech tourist attractions, made up of victims of the black death.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1970, 10'

The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope

Jan Švankmajer brings together, in a fantastic and terrifying way, two stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “A Torture by Hope”, respectively.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1983, 15'

Virile Games

When a football game becomes an odyssey of inventive mutilations.

Jan Švankmajer

Animation, 1988, 15'