Object Lessons: An Introduction to an Interview with Jan Švankmajer

That Turned into an Essay by Jan Švankmajer

Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron

The Moving Image, Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 2011, pp. 100-102 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press

DOI: 10.1353/mov.2011.0039

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mov/summary/v011/11.2.orgeron.html

Access provided by Lomonosov Moscow State University (17 Dec 2013 12:06 GMT)
 Forum
object lessons
An Introduction to
an Interview with Jan
Švankmajer That Turned into
an Essay by Jan Švankmajer
DEVIN ORGERON AND
MARSHA ORGERON
We did not go to Prague expecting to interview
Jan Švankmajer. We knew, however, that the
enormously influential Czech surrealist film-
maker’s work would feature prominently in
the film courses we were teaching for North
Carolina State University’s Prague Institute
in summer 2009. And we knew that Gambra,
Švankmajer’s Prague gallery, would be just a
few minutes’ walk from our apartment. We also
knew that it couldn’t hurt to try to meet some-
one whose films we had both greatly admired
and marveled at for many years.
Our summer in Prague occurred just as we
were accepting the reins of The Moving Image,
and we hoped to do some work relevant to the
journal during our stay. Both of us had always
thought of Švankmajer—the director of such
feature films as Neco z Alenky (Alice; 1988),
Faust (1994), Otesánek (Little Otik; 2000),
and Sílení (Lunacy; 2005)—in archival terms.
A collector whose obsessions are evident in all
his work, Švankmajer’s cinematic aesthetic is
defined by the objects that populate his films.
Watching even one of Švankmajer’s many short
films, the viewer is soon aware that she is in
the hands of an artist with a vast inventory of
objects at his disposal and that these objects
literally bring life to his highly inventive, often
quite disturbing worlds.
With our minds on The Moving Image
as we settled into our Prague summer, we
found ourselves returning to the subject of
Švankmajer. His own seemingly idiosyncratic
practice—his concepts of collection, organiza-
tion, and access—seemed to quite productively
defy a number of our largely academically con-
ceived notions. What, we wondered, might
Jan Švankmajer have to say about the idea of
the archive?
Švankmajer works in a number of media,
but he is best known for his filmed surrealist
100
animations. Surrealism—maybe generally, but
certainly as Švankmajer practices it—might be
thought of as a form of archiving that, among
other things, explodes some of the barriers that
exist between seemingly incongruous objects.
Thought of in these terms, stop-motion anima-
tion of the sort Švankmajer incorporates into
his work is a near-perfect surrealist method for
its uncanny ability to defamiliarize otherwise
familiar objects by altering their presumed
context and by reorganizing them in surprising
ways. Before the term came into the popular
vocabulary, Švankmajer was a remix filmmaker,
assembling narratives, not from bits and pieces
of found film (à la Craig Baldwin), but from bits
and pieces of discarded culture more broadly
(dolls, buttons, playing cards, bones, flatware,
meat, etc.). This method of finding new and
unexpected contexts and situations for ob-
jects that might otherwise be mistaken for
cultural refuse forms the foundational logic
of Švankmajer’s cinema. It is also a philoso-
phy that informs Švankmajer’s approach to
collecting.
Like many surrealists before him,
Švankmajer has penned or signed a number
of manifesto-like statements over the years,
though very little of his writing is available
in English. Perhaps best known is the artist’s
“Decalogue,” sort of a ten commandments
of Švankmajerism. Here Švankmajer makes
several declarations of particular interest to
the archival community. Though speaking of
objects generally, Švankmajer writes, in the
third commandment, that “first you have to
become a collector and only then a filmmaker.
Bringing objects to life through animation has
to be a natural process. Life has to come from
within them, not from your whim. Never violate
objects!”1 Objects, in Švankmajer’s view, are
never neutral. They possess a will. The make
demands on their hosts. They determine their
own organizational logic.
Because Švankmajer speaks little English,
and we speak even less Czech, he requested
that we provide our questions prior to our
visit to his studio in Knoviz. We prepared two
pages of questions (graciously translated into
Czech by the amazing Pavla Jonssonová, of
rock band Zuby Nehty fame), many of which
asked the filmmaker to consider the particular
circumstances involved in the collection and
Forum 101

Figure 1. Jan Švankmajer in

the basement of his studio
in Knoviz, Czech Republic.
Photograph by Marsha
Orgeron.
 Forum 102
creation of moving images. We reproduce his
response in the following Forum entry. Perhaps
not surprisingly, Švankmajer elected to trans-
form our attempted interview into something
else, taking the occasion of our questions to
write a short essay—in some ways, another
manifesto—on his philosophy of collecting
more generally. His ideas are a bit fanciful,
as one would expect of someone possessing
Švankmajer’s particular genius, but they are
also quite instructive. Preferring the highly
subjective principle of the cabinet of wonders—
where, in his estimation, it is the subjectivity of
the objects and not their host that rules—to the
objectivity of archives or museums, Švankmajer
makes a case for archives (a term he does not
endorse in this context) as necessarily imagi-
native enterprises where wild juxtapositions
are as important as scholarly order. Reading
Švankmajer’s short treatise, we realized that,
more than most of us would care to admit,
our community delights in something similar.
Archival Screening Night at the annual Associa-
tion of Moving Image Archivists conference and
the Orphan Film Symposium—not to mention
the theme of the 2011 Northeast Historic Film
Symposium, “Das Wunderkino: A Cinematic
Cabinet of Curiosities”—are reminders of our
own enthusiasm for the principle of the cabinet
of wonders.
Švankmajer’s studio is an easy forty-five-
minute drive outside Prague, in the small town
of Knoviz. The artist and a host of employees
and interns, we were told, would be bustling
about the former movie theater as they com-
pleted work on Švankmajer’s 2010 feature,
Prezít svuj zivot (teorie a praxe) (Surviving Life
[Theory and Practice]). We knew that we were
in the right place when we passed the exterior
wall of the former cinema and its adjoining
buildings and noticed that they were adorned
with an array of busts decorated with pieces
of cutlery and protruding digits.
Švankmajer was a warm, gracious host—
not at all the disturbed, menacing soul we
imagined based on our viewings of his films.
He showed us around his studio and its many
object-filled rooms. When we asked if he would
pose for a picture, Švankmajer led us into the
basement, where he had recently shot scenes
for Lunacy. While we held our breaths, waiting
for an animated monstrosity of some sort to
materialize and dispense with us (basements
hold nightmarish surprises in Švankmajer’s
films!), Švankmajer cheerily posed with an
object of his choosing (see Figure 1). He sat
with us in the studio kitchen and showed us
his scrapbooks, filled with images of his castle,
where he has created his own version of a
Wunderkabinet. Though Švankmajer writes, in
the short piece that follows, about his literal
cabinets of wonders, it is clear that his studio
and his films are an extension of this logic.
Notes
For their generous acts of assistance involving
translation, driving, signature getting, con-
sultation, and facilitation, we sincerely thank
Jakub Tesinsky, Pavla Jonssonová, Gabriel
M. Paletz, Ondřej Kálal, Alice Lovejoy, Dana
Bartelt, Pavla Kallistova, Jaromir Kallista, and
Jan-Christopher Horak.
1. Jan Švankmajer, “Decalogue,” Vertigo: For
Worldwide Independent Film 3, no. 1 (2006): 72.