Abstract
Jan Švankmajer’s latest feature film, Surviving Life (Přežít svůj život, 2010), begins with an introduction by the august Czech filmmaker himself, who warns us that what we are about to see is not a “normal live-action film.” “Due to the lack of financial means,” Švankmajer baldly explains, “we reached for the simplest technique, namely that of cut-out animation” (“papírkový film,” literally “paper film”). By this means, he continues, the production reduced such costs as the actors’ fees, as “we mainly only used their photographs.” Švankmajer employs the technique from the outset, rendering his own presence a jittering series of animated stills. His explanations attest that this approach “is no formal experiment, rather an imperfect, poor substitute for a live-action film.”
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© 2016 Rebecca Ferreboeuf, Fiona Noble, Tara Plunkett
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Owen, J. (2016). Films for the Drawer: Postwar Czech Surrealism and the Impossible Encounter with Cinema. In: Ferreboeuf, R., Noble, F., Plunkett, T. (eds) Preservation, Radicalism, and the Avant-Garde Canon. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137474377_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137474377_13
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