Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Svankmajer (Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0313296987 ISBN 13: 9780313296987

Verlag: Praeger, 1995

Inhaltsangabe

Czech animator Jan Svankmajer is one of the most distinctive and influential of contemporary filmmakers. As a leading member of the Prague Surrealist Group, his work is linked to a rich avant-garde tradition and an uncompromising moral stance that brought frequent tensions with the authorities in the normalization years following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Svankmajer's formative influences have been the pre-war surrealists, the Prague of Rudolf II, experimental theatre, folk puppetry and, above all, the political traumas of the past 50 years. Like his contemporaries-including playwright president Vaclav Havel, and, in exile, novelist Milan Kundera and filmmaker Milos Forman-Svankmajer's dominant life experiences have been the realities of the Stalinist system, both the explicit state terror of the 1950s and the Brezhnevist neo-Stalinism of the 1970s and the 1980s.

After training in puppetry and working in the Prague theatre, he made his first film in 1964. He directed a number of important films in the 1960s, including the live-action and Kafkaesque Byt (The Flat, 1968) and Zahrada (The Garden, 1968) and consolidated his international reputation with Moznosti dialogu (Dimensions of Dialogue) in 1982. Since then, he has continued his highly visual and poetic approach in two feature-length films, Neco z Alenky (Alice, 1987) and Lekce Faust (Faust, 1994). As a filmmaker, Svankmajer is constantly exploring and analyzing his concern with power, fear and anxiety, confrontation and destruction, magic, the irrational and the absurd, and displays a bleak outlook on the possibilities for dialogue. In challenging accepted narrative, the bourgeoisie of realism (nezval), and the thematic and formal conventions of the mainstream media, Svankmajer's work is startlingly dynamic, subversive, and confrontational.

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PETER HAMES is Course Leader in Film, Television, and Radio Studies at Staffordshire University. He has written widely on Czech and Slovak cinema over many years. He is author of The Czechoslovak New Wave (1985) and contributor to Five Filmmakers: Challenging the Boundaries (1991) and Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1989). He has published in a range of journals including Sight and Sound, New Statesman and Society, and Index on Censorship.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Praeger
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1995
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0313296987
• ISBN 13: 9780313296987
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Herausgeber: Hames Peter
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; contact@bloomsbury.com; ; 50 Bedford Square; London; England; WC1B 3DP; Deutschland