Object Lessons: An Introduction to an Interview with Jan Švankmajer That Turned into an Essay by Jan Švankmajer

We did not go to Prague expecting to interview Jan Švankmajer. We knew, however, that the enormously influential Czech surrealist filmmaker'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 someone 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, organization, and access—seemed to quite productively defy a number of our largely academically conceived 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 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 animation 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 objects that might otherwise be mistaken for cultural refuse forms the foundational logic of Švankmajer's cinema. It is also a philosophy 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

Figure 1.

Jan Švankmajer in the...