Jan Svankmajer – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Svankmajer’s Decalogue

Natural History (1973) by Jan Svankmajer.

A Jan Svankmajer interview I was reading recently contained two references to something he called his “Decalogue” but no detail as to what this might be. The mystery was explained in a footnote: “Decalogue” is a collection of ten artistic principles that Svankmajer wrote for a film magazine, Vertigo, in 2006. Given the low circulation of these kinds of journals I expected the piece to be unavailable but the magazine has a website which reproduces the full text here.

Despite the title, these aren’t really Ten Commandments, they’re more statements of Svankmajer’s artistic philosophy, and as such won’t be suitable for everyone, or for every purpose when they’re so heavily oriented towards animated film. All the same, I like to see things like this even if I don’t agree with them; sometimes finding a principle you disagree with is a way of confirming or reinforcing the value of its opposite. In other cases you may find a condensation of a vague impulse which becomes easier to recall when set into words. A good example of the latter is the well-known instruction from Eno & Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies (which also has a quasi-religious tone:) “Honour your error as a hidden intention”. I seldom follow this one but I keep it in mind. As Svankmajer says at the end of his piece, rules like these are also made to be broken.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Magic Art of Jan Svankmajer
• Svankmajer’s cats
• Jan Svankmajer: The Animator of Prague
• Jan Svankmajer, Director
• Don Juan, a film by Jan Svankmajer
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Two sides of Liska

The Magic Art of Jan Svankmajer

Three years ago I binged on all the Jan Svankmajer feature films after buying the box of blu-rays released by the director’s Athanor company. Once I’d worked my way through that lot, and rewatched the BFI collection of Svankmajer’s short films, I went through all the documentaries I’ve managed to accumulate, including this two-part BBC study which I taped when it was first broadcast in 1992. It’s likely that Svankmajer’s approach to film and to Surrealism no longer requires the kind of introduction that seemed necessary in the 1990s, but for those who do need such a thing this is a good place to start.

Ben Fox’s documentary was made to coincide with an exhibition of Svankmajer’s films and artworks being shown at an animation festival in Cardiff. The two installments examine a different aspect of Svankmajer’s cinematic works: “Memories of Mysterious Beings” concerns the films that deal with childhood dreams and fears, while “The Naming of Demons” concentrates on his use of Surrealism as a tool for satire or social critique. In between lengthy extracts from the films the camera prowls around some of the director’s artworks while an actor reads statements Svankmajer has made about his interests and intentions. This last feature isn’t something I enjoy very much, not when the actor’s nasal delivery is so different from Svankmajer’s own voice. It’s a common ploy in documentaries, having someone impersonate an interviewee to avoid using subtitles, but it’s one I find distracting when done like this.

Eva liked statues.

At this point I would have directed your attention once again to Jan Svankmajer, Director, a documentary about Czech cinema which featured the man himself talking at length about his activities in the 1960s, but this has now been removed from YouTube. In its place, however, there’s a more recent upload, Les Chimères des Svankmajer, an 80-minute documentary for French TV by Bertrand Schmitt and Michel Leclerc which is included among the extras on the BFI’s collection of Svankmajer’s short films. The only trouble here is that the YT copy has no subtitles, you’ll need to be a French speaker to understand the voice-overs which run throughout. This is one of the best of all the Svankmajer documentaries since it shows the range of activities conducted by Svankmajer and his late wife, Eva Svankmajerová, as artists and foremost members of the Prague Surrealist Group; film-making, as Svankmajer has often stressed in interviews, was only one outlet for his creativity. (It was also one he was forbidden to practice for several years when the Communist authorities took exception to his work.) In addition to seeing the Svankmajers preparing an exhibition of their creations, Schmidt and Leclerc show us something of their home outside Prague, an artwork in itself that combines the sculpture park and Wunderkammer. Eva Svankmajerová was the creator of many of those sculptures, a celebrated artist in her own right whose contribution to her husband’s films has often been overlooked.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Svankmajer’s cats
• Jan Svankmajer: The Animator of Prague
• Jan Svankmajer, Director
• Don Juan, a film by Jan Svankmajer
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Two sides of Liska

Art on film: The Beast

The Beast: Lisbeth Hummel, Elisabeth Kaza and Marcel Dalio.

In which Polish director Walerian Borowczyk places a little-known Symbolist painting in the background of The Beast, his strange sex film (or should that be strange-sex film?) from 1975. I’ve spent the past week or so working my way through Arrow’s box of Borowczyk films, of which The Beast is the last in the collection. It’s also the one film by the director that many people may be aware of even if they’ve never seen it, thanks to a historical reverie in which an 18th-century woman has a very graphic sexual encounter with the beast of the title, a bear-like creature with a fully-functioning phallus. This episode is framed by a somewhat farcical modern-day story set in a French chateau, with the bestiality flashback being the culmination of a parade of sexual antics that include equally graphic scenes of horse-breeding, female masturbation, and thwarted attempts by the daughter of the house to have sex with one of the servants.

Frenzy aka Frenzy of Exultations (1893).

And this is the painting that Borowczyk shows. I said that it’s little-known but it happens to be the most visible of all the paintings by Polish artist Wladyslaw Podkowinski (1866–1895), with a popularity in Poland that extends to reproduction on postcards and jigsaw puzzles. (That huge area of shadow must cause puzzle-solvers some headaches.) I only recognised the picture because Michael Gibson includes it in his wide-ranging study of Symbolist art, although he doesn’t have much to say about it apart from its having caused a minor scandal when it was first exhibited. This isn’t too surprising; prior to the 20th century there were few Western artworks that were so overt in their depiction of erotic delirium without tipping into outright pornography. Given this you’d expect Borowczyk to make more of the reference but he keeps the picture in the background, a reward for the small percentage of the audience who can identify the thing at a distance.

Frenzy is dramatically different to Podkowinski’s other paintings, most of which are Impressionist studies, and is further distinguished by having been attacked by its creator when the artist slashed the canvas with a knife while it was still being exhibited. Paintings and sculptures have been subject to attacks by members of the public for many years but this is the first I’ve heard of an artist attacking their own work while it was on display. The scandalous history suits the film as much as the salacious subject matter; The Beast was almost subject to an obscenity prosecution when an uncensored print was shown in London in the 1970s. For a long time it was one of those troublesome features that you’d be more likely to read about than to see.

Continue reading “Art on film: The Beast”

Quay Brothers posters

This Sweet Sickness (1977).

Looking around for Quay Brothers designs turned up an item I hadn’t seen before, a poster for the UK release of a French film by Claude Miller, This Sweet Sickness, starring Gérard Depardieu. I’ve not seen the film either, nor have I read the Patricia Highsmith novel on which it was based although a copy of the book has been sitting on my shelves for some time, together with a couple of other unread Highsmiths. The poster dates from just before the Quays started to get serious about their own film-making.

Nocturna Artificiala: Those Who Desire Without End (1979). The organ pipes, which don’t appear in the film, are an allusion to the improvised organ score by Stefan Cichonski.

Being graphic designers as well as film-makers puts the Quay Brothers in a very rare class, one where they not only make the films but also design the posters used to promote their films. Offhand, I can only think of the late Eva Svankmajerová as being in the same company so it’s perhaps fitting that her husband and artistic collaborator, Jan Svankmajer, was the subject of an early film by the Quays.

Street of Crocodiles (1986).

Stille Nacht: Dramolet (1988). An early use of Heinrich Holzmüller’s typographic designs.

Continue reading “Quay Brothers posters”

Weekend links 545

Colour wheel from The Natural System of Colours (1766) by Moses Harris.

• The Vatican’s favourite homosexual, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, receives the ludicrously expensive art-book treatment in a huge $22,000 study of the Sistine Chapel frescos. Thanks, but I’ll stick with Taschen’s XXL Tom of Finland collection which cost considerably less and contains larger penises. Related: How Taschen became the world’s most famous erotic publishers.

• “In a metaphorical sense, a book cover is also a frame around the text and a bridge between text and world.” Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth on what a book cover can do.

• The Night Porter: Nazi porn or daring arthouse eroticism? Ryan Gilbey talks to director Liliana Cavani about a film that’s still more read about (and condemned) than seen.

What is important about reading [Walter] Benjamin’s texts written under the influence of drugs is how you can then read back into all his work much of this same “drug” mind-set; in his university student days, wrangling with Kant’s philosophy at great length, he famously stated, according to Scholem, that “a philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee grounds and cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosophy.” That was in 1913, and Scholem adds that such an approach must be “recognized as possible from the connection of things.” Scholem recalled seeing on Benjamin’s desk a few years later a copy of Baudelaire’s Les paradis artificiels, and that long before Benjamin took any drugs, he spoke of “the expansion of human experience in hallucinations,” by no means to be confused with “illusions.” Kant, Benjamin said, “motivated an inferior experience.”

Michael Taussig on getting high with Benjamin and Burroughs

• “Utah monolith: Internet sleuths got there, but its origins are still a mystery.” The solution to the mystery—if there is one—will be inferior to the mystery itself.

• After Beardsley (1981), a short animated film about Aubrey Beardsley by Chris James, is now available on YouTube in its complete form.

• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XXIII – An Ivy-Strangled Midwinter by David Colohan.

• Charlie Huenemann on the Monas Hieroglyphica, Feynman diagrams, and the Voynich Manuscript.

• Katy Kelleher on verdigris: the colour of oxidation, statues, and impermanence.

• A trailer for Athanor: The Alchemical Furnace, a documentary about Jan Svankmajer.

• All doom and boom: what’s the heaviest music ever made?

• At Strange Flowers: Ludwig the Second first and last.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Krzysztof Kieslowski Day.

• Ralph Steadman’s cultural highlights.

• RIP Daria Nicolodi.

• Michael Angelo (1967) by The 23rd Turnoff | Nightporter (1980) by Japan | Verdigris (2020) by Roger Eno and Brian Eno