Jan Švankmajer Shorts Series [screening: Havel 90 Festival]

Four visionary shorts by Czech Surrealist Jan Švankmajer transform bodies, objects, and political history into darkly comic visions.
About this Event

This screening is part of the Havel 90 Festival Film Marathon, a three-day exploration of Havel’s relationship with cinema within a four-day celebration of his life, art, and legacy.

Jan Švankmajer Shorts Series / dir. Jan Švankmajer / 1968–1990 / animation, experimental film, surrealism / Czechoslovakia / Czech with English subtitles or no dialogue / approx. 49 min.

Filmmaker, animator, and visual artist Jan Švankmajer created a cinematic world in which clay, food, furniture, and human bodies rebel against ordinary logic. Spanning more than two decades, these four films reveal the remarkable range of his imagination and his singular blend of tactile animation, macabre humor, and political allegory.

PROGRAM

Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu) / 1982 / 14 min.
Three escalating encounters explore communication as consumption, desire, repetition, and mutual destruction.

Darkness, Light, Darkness (Tma, světlo, tma) / 1989 / 8 min.
Disembodied human parts assemble themselves inside a cramped room, only to discover that completeness can become another form of confinement.

The Garden (Zahrada) / 1968 / 17 min.
A visitor arrives at a friend’s country home and discovers that the garden is enclosed by a living fence made of people holding hands.

The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (Konec stalinismu v Čechách) / 1990 / 10 min.
An operation on a bust of Stalin unleashes a rapid, grotesque account of Czechoslovak history from the Communist takeover of 1948 to the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

Švankmajer and Havel belonged to the same generation of Czech artists whose work was curtailed by communist censorship. One through surrealist film, the other through absurdist theater, they transformed the distortions of life under authoritarianism into radically imaginative art. Together, these shorts offer a concentrated introduction to one of Czech cinema’s most original and influential artists.

Havel 90 Festival is organized by the Czech Center New York and the Vaclav Havel Center, with support from the Bohemian Benevolent & Literary Association.

DISCLAIMER

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