{"id":29672,"date":"2026-01-21T14:35:18","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T14:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=29672"},"modified":"2026-01-21T14:35:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T14:35:18","slug":"ex-libris-a-film-by-garik-seko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2026\/01\/21\/ex-libris-a-film-by-garik-seko\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex Libris, a film by Garik Seko"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/exlibris1-big.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/exlibris1.jpg\" alt=\"exlibris1.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Garik Seko (1935\u20131994) is an animator whose work I hadn&#8217;t encountered before. He was born in Tiflis, Georgia, but worked in Prague where a number of his shorts (this one among them) were made at the Ji\u0159\u00ed Trnka Studio. Seko&#8217;s speciality was the animation of physical objects, in the case of this film a quantity of anthropomorphised books populating the shelves of a bookcase. Jan \u0160vankmajer comes immediately to mind when watching <em>Ex Libris<\/em>, especially when two philosophy books chew each other to pieces following a vociferous argument. \u0160vankmajer also made films at the Trnka Studio but I&#8217;d wary of suggesting an influence in one direction or another when the similarities are superficial ones. <em>Ex Libris<\/em> was made in 1983, by which time \u0160vankmajer had been animating physical objects (and people) for many years. His own films are more aggressive than Seko&#8217;s, usually with a philosophical or Surrealist subtext. <em>Ex Libris<\/em> may be seen <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=PXCJFKR2i6k\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/exlibris2-big.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/exlibris2.jpg\" alt=\"exlibris2.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Garik Seko (1935\u20131994) is an animator whose work I hadn&#8217;t encountered before. He was born in Tiflis, Georgia, but worked in Prague where a number of his shorts (this one among them) were made at the Ji\u0159\u00ed Trnka Studio. Seko&#8217;s speciality was the animation of physical objects, in the case of this film a quantity &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2026\/01\/21\/ex-libris-a-film-by-garik-seko\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Ex Libris, a film by Garik Seko&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Ex Libris, a film by Garik Seko","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,42,7],"tags":[14377,375,14213],"class_list":["post-29672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animation","category-books","category-film","tag-garik-seko","tag-jan-svankmajer","tag-jiri-trnka"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-7IA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}