Jan Svankmajer / Keith Leslie Johnson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnson, Keith Leslie, 1974- author.

Series:

Contemporary film directors.

Contemporary film directors

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Švankmajer, Jan, 1934---Criticism and interpretation.

Švankmajer, Jan.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Summary:

Jan Svankmajer enjoys a curious sort of anti-reputation: he is famous for being obscure. Unapologetically surrealist, Svankmajer draws on the traditions and techniques of stop-motion animation, collage, montage, puppetry, and clay to craft bizarre filmscapes. If these creative choices are off-putting to some, they have nonetheless won the Czech filmmaker recognition as a visionary animator. Keith Leslie Johnson explores Svankmajer's work as a cinema that spawns new and weird life forms "hybrids of machine, animal, and non-organic materials like stone and dust. Johnson's ambitious approach unlocks access to the director's world, a place governed by a single, uncanny order of being where all things are at once animated and inert. For Svankmajer, everything is at stake in every aspect of life, whether that life takes the form of an object, creature, or human. Sexuality, social bonds, religious longings "all get recapitulated on the stage of inanimate things. In Johnson's view, Svankmajer stands as the proponent of a biopolitical, ethical, and ecological outlook that implores us to reprogram our relationship with the vital matter all around us, including ourselves and our bodies.

Contents:

Animist cinema

humiliation, or object life

Wunderkammer, or Creaturely Life

Haptics, or Animal Life

Imagination, or Political Life

Stalinism in Bohemia

Survival, or Ecological Life

Interviews with Jan Švankmajer.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780252050077

025205007X

OCLC:

1017000738