Since I discovered the short
films of the Czeck filmmaker Jan Svankmajer in college, borrowed from the
private stash of DVDs in the office of the Film Studies tutors, I can say he is
one of my cherished filmmakers. Having seen all the other shorts and films,
the through line from the famous short works to long form movies is a
fascinating progression. One of the best living animation directors, his
knowledge of traditional techniques (puppetry, stop motion etc) is matched by a
distinct use of everyday objects – toys, wood, metal, animal bones, even pieces
of meat – that are moved and crafted in ways that pushes the films into the
areas of texture as well as sight and sound, allowing the viewer to ‘feel’ them
by their nature and the grain and details you can see. This trademark, through
decades of shorts, was combined with various types of ideas, from adaptations
of Edgar Allen Poe and fairytales to satire, and his idiosyncratic obsessions
such as childhood to food and the act of eating, the later the result of digestive
issues as a child, and the attempts to fix it by doctors, that made him fascinated
and disgusted by them. (Going into a Svankmajer work, you will both see food as
a beautiful substance and utterly vile, which Surviving Life continues with the new addition of projectile
vomit.) With his first feature film Alice
(1988), Svankmajer would incorporate
live action, but not in just having actors in front of the screen but having
them being as much figures for the director to animate as well as actual
people. Svankmajer incorporated this in short films, 1983’s Down To The Cellar a predecessor of his
debut Alice, but after he started to
concentrate on feature films, this has become a central part of his work. With Lunacy (2005), the film before Surviving Life, the live action would
have completely taken over were it not for the continuous scenes of animated
cow tongues that are intercut between plot points. With Surviving Life, Svankmajer’s fanbase is either met with an
experimental tangent from his previous films, his bitterly humorous opening
monologue to the camera introducing the film as a result of a lack of money for
production, or a potentially new direction for the next decade.
Created using cut-and-paste
photographic images, ‘like old children’s cartoons’ as the director compares it
to in the opening introduction, Surviving
Life follows an older man Eugenie whose life is punctuated by dreams of a
beautiful, red dressed woman whose name continually changes and exists in a
dream reality which continually fluxes out of his hands. Becoming a patient for
a psychoanalytic doctor, and delving into other methods of guiding his dreams, he tries to understand the images
he sees every time he sleeps.
The plot sounds quite common and
paradoxically, this is the closest for me yet Svankmajer has gotten to a ‘conventional’
story - including the layer of clues and images you discover on a second
viewing - but is one of his least conventional works in a filmography that
would be viewed as abstract against traditional views of animation. The cut-up
images that make up the entire film, spliced with live action moments (usually
close ups of intricate actions or gestures), is incredibly different from what
I have encountered in cinema. If anyone, like I did as a child, used to cut out
images from magazines or comics and either moved them about like toys, or
spliced pieces of them together to create new ones, this is what the entirety
of Surviving Life feels like, only
taking to it to an entire feature length film, from the background to most of
the moments, being created from two dimension images cut out and finished
digitally on computers.
This style of animation has been
used by Svankmajer previously, including outside his film work, but here it is
allowed to breathe out into this entire construction. The results are surreal,
human beings and their photographic copies alive and mixed with a story where
dreams are in the centre of the narrative. As he describes in a making-of for
the UK DVD, Svankmajer has played with the concept of dreams in his
filmography, but this is the first one where they are the central subject. With
this, expect Freudian images of everything from eggs to flowers, giant hands
coming out of windows to drag bystanders up to their doom, a dog with a suited
office worker’s body, and an entire film where reality and the dreams, while separated,
still bleed into each other, continuing Svankmajer’s message at the start of
the film, through quotation, of how only by combining the both of them together
can a human being be full. The result is unconventional even for animation,
incredibly creative with its imagination and technical production, and with a
wonderful sense of disgracefulness in Svankmajer’s old age, a newly acquired
sense of vulgarity that did not even come out in Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), his take on sexual fetishes, but
erupts in this wonderfully in its sex obsessed, puke filled, poodle fucking
mentality filtered through the obsessions with childhood, food and the fantastical.
This may have started in Lunacy,
with its combination with the Marquis de Sade with stories by Edgar Allen Poe, but
while that film was serious in its takes of blasphemy and of the concepts of
freedom, the self proclaimed follower of Surrealist Art Svankmajer has properly
added a sliver of crudity to his repertoire with Surviving Life and uses it perfectly. The film is also abstract in
that, it does not only look at dreams but incorporates psychology. My knowledge
of the area is slim, but my small reading is enough for me to realise that this
adds further complicated strands to the plot. The plot is incredibly obvious by
its ending but by invoking the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, personifying
their real life combative and disagreeing views of psychology through living
portraits which fight each other, Surviving
Life introduces layers that, while very easy to grasp, cause the scenes you
see to take on new and peculiar lights to them.
Upon watching this and Lunacy this year, I realise I am biased
for Jan Svankmajer, but it’s through his skill of an animator and as a creative
figure, still able to create such imaginative and stimulating work after fifty
years or so since his first projects. To step into a Svankmajer film, while
part of a rich culture of animation (especially European animation), is to
encounter a truly unique voice, driven as much by ideas behind the images as by
the creations on screen. Surviving Life combines
a full narrative with this, as seen in his other features, and gets the best of
both worlds. That it is also humorous and, by its ending, deeply poignant also
adds to its quality.
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low) – High
Personal Rating – 10 out of 10
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