Surviving Life - Master Švankmajer returns to the screen with a ‘psychoanalytical comedy’

It is only every five years or so that the renowned Czech animator Jan Švankmajer brings out a new film, and the wait is now over. “Surviving Life” draws on many of Švankmajer’s traditional themes and styles while exploring them through an experimental medium, once again confirming why he is the most acclaimed Czech art house director at home and abroad.

'Surviving Life'

Evžen is an aging office clerk who has been having some strange dreams lately, largely involving a beautiful woman. When the dreams continue to recur, he seeks the help of a psychoanalyst, not to get rid of them, but instead so that he can have even more. When his wife finds out, she tells him to choose whether he wants to live in a dream or in reality, the choice is obvious… particularly if you know the work of Jan Švankmajer.

Whether you are very familiar with the films of Mr Švankmajer, and even on the odd chance you have never heard of him, Surviving Life (Přežít svůj život) presents a new experience for you, with all the artistic mayhem that a connoisseur of surrealist cinematography demands, but more of the silly comedy that Czechs adore, and less of the horror that typifies a Švankmajer film. Regarding that balance between polar genres, the master animator (who fairly hates giving interviews) told Czech Radio that such is life; his other works were comedies as well, he says.

“All of my films play out on that sharp edge between what we think of as ‘horror’ and ‘comedy’, or black humour. I think that that our whole lives oscillate in just that way, and they are equivalent to a kind of comedy. So, really all of my films could be called a kind of comedy.”

'Surviving Life'

In any case, Surviving Life should not be catalogued as comedy or horror, but deserves that special shelf called “Švankmajerovský” that other international greats like Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam have drawn from. And in that category of experimental animated cinema the director has changed the rules again, but this time calling it a “poor man’s substitute” for experimentation, because he couldn’t find the money to do otherwise. Surviving Life uses animated photography, a method he says was toyed with in the 1960s, but was never used for a feature-length production with actors, until now.

“I have to say, we didn’t do it because I wanted to use new techniques, but because we thought we’d save money. Finding money for the kinds of films I do is becoming harder and harder, and in this case it looked like it was going to be even more difficult than usual. And so I decided that if photographs of the actors were animated… we could move the entire film to the studio.”

Plenty of directors would never admit their having sacrificed art because they were low on cash; Jan Švankmajer though positively revels in it in his promotion of Surviving Life, and says so himself in an animated introduction to the film (a style of prologue that he adopted in his last film, “Lunacy”). His leading lady, Klára Issová, doesn’t really buy it though.

Klára Issová in 'Surviving Life'

“He was trying something a bit new, so I think he was surprised as well. He says he chose this technique because he didn’t have the money to do one they way he did before, but I think it’s a kind of joke maybe, and that he was surprised how it worked for the audience and for himself, as well.”

For all of the actors, this meant an entirely new way of working. For one thing, they hardly ever met each other (which makes reviews praising the actors’ chemistry all the better), but spoke their lines into the camera, taking tens of thousands of photographs during fifteen days spread out over one year.

“It’s a different kind of work that in a normal movie. We spent the first day just taking photographs of my mouth saying, like, “La, na, ha”, whatever, combinations of letters. And then there were combinations of making pictures and short scenes from the script. So some of them we made with a very old camera, but they were not whole scenes but only, like, sentences. So it was a combination of several things which he and his team put together over one year.”

So doing a film like this, you could have even less of an idea of what it was going to look like in the end than you usually would with a normal film.

'Surviving Life'

“Of course, yes. I had no idea. And I think he was surprised as well.”

Is it something you would do again?

“With Švankmajer? Yes, of course.”

Švankmajer: “The screenplay was written as a feature film with actors, so that’s what the actors expected it to be. So there is a lot of dialogue though, even a lot for me, and so we had to photograph speech – the photographs actually speak. So I was mouthing the dialogues with them, then we would count the speech out and based on that make the groundwork for the animators.”

Does life on the set of a surrealist film ever become surreal itself?

Issová: “Maybe a little bit, yeah [laughs]. For me it was funny that every time I came there was more stuff around and more people, and just imagine that it is not a new studio, it is like an old house and there is so much stuff… it looks like the inside of an old factory or something. And for me it was funny that after a while some people would come and start working on computers, some would be doing photographs, some were on the set working with actors, and it was nice. I saw some pictures of myself, and they had put some flowers around my head, and I thought ‘Oh my god, I look like Frida Kahlo’”.

Surviving Life is subtitled “a psychoanalytical comedy”. The main character is terrified of life, as well as the things he has lived through without even knowing it, and by consciously entering his dreams he is able to relive and understand the painful realities of his life. “Dreaminess” has always been a defining characteristic of Švankmajer’s work, but Surviving Life is his first film “about” dreams (in fact about a dream of his own); he told Czech Radio that he regrets that society puts less stock in dreams than back in the shaman days.

“The modern age doesn’t care about dreams, because there’s no money in them, and they’ve been pushed back somewhere to the periphery of the human psyche, which I consider an absolute devaluation of human life. As I say in the introduction, quoting Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, it is only the fusion of dreams and reality that can make what is called a human life. But people eliminate their dreams, get panicked by them, and those people devalue themselves when they don’t take dreams seriously and as a part of their lives.”

Surviving Life is Jan Švankmajer’s sixth feature film, and certainly need not be the lively 76-year-old’s last, but in any case, since a Švankmajer production only comes around once every five years or so it is not an event to be missed.

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The episode featured today was first broadcast on November 19, 2010.