jan švankmajer taught me it was ok to roll bread up into a bunch of tiny balls and snort them
a personal essay? about pursuing personal interests in media? and being horny for textures?
nearly 10 years ago I stumbled upon an article that wound up having an enormous impact on my taste in film, which at the time I’d laid in the hands of generic best-movies-of-all-time lists indoctrinating me with bergman and fellini and a bunch of other guys that are like…..cool, but not necessarily of particular interest to me. the article was slant magazine’s 100 best films of the 1990s, which, being published over a decade after the ’90s ended, felt like a rare, level-headed assessment of an era in film after ample time to reappraise obscure, maligned, or otherwise uncool-within-elitist-circles titles which made up a huge portion of the list.
in addition to introducing me to so many movies I’d never heard of that I wound up loving, what felt most special to me about it was that instead of embellishing each blurb with the standard, generic, and often overused press shot, it felt like the mag was grabbing their own screenshots for a handful of the movies, an underused method of visual media sharing that allowed them to be subtle about themes and major plot points while teasing the movies’ more intriguing imagery (the pic for crash, for example, is a hand caressing a seemingly innocuous damaged car door which, if you’ve seen the movie, yeah, obviously looks vaginal (editor’s note: either I totally made that up or they’ve changed it lmao)).
among the list, one image impacted me far more than any other. it looked like this:
the screenshot belonged to a movie called conspirators of pleasure by a czech filmmaker and visual artist named jan svankmajer, and although I had so, so many more rational reasons for exploring other titles on the list first, the moment I saw this fucked up bird man I knew it had to be the next movie I watched, even though, allegedly, it was only the 79th best movie of the decade it came out in. there was something so tactile about the image—in addition to its dull pre-digital film quality, it’s the textures of the different layers of clothing, of the chicken head, and of the wings that stand out most once you’re done contemplating whether what you’re looking at is an earnest costume design or some freak disguise thrown together by one of the film’s characters.
turned out tactility is kind of svankmajer’s whole thing. in fact, conspirators is quite literally a movie about fetishizing textures. over the course of 90 minutes, a near magnolia’s worth of characters discreetly and inaudibly (there’s no dialogue in the entire film) compile a shopping list of items which they ultimately take to a covert corner of their living space and secretly play out their ultimate tactile fantasy—whether that be snorting bread, getting their toes sucked by fish, or dressing up like a weird chicken guy and engaging in a low-key erotic torture sesh with your neighbor.
it’s a movie about our own weird little rituals in life we take pleasure from without being able to share them with others (I wrote at length about it within the context of the movie her) either due to shame or because it’s so specific no one else would be able to relate. for me, that looks like randomly generating two decades’ worth of NBA seasons on an excel spreadsheet during the first year of a pandemic-incited quarantine. for svankmajer, that looks like making films about sensual pleasure.
here’s a grid of stills from select titles from his filmography, most of which is worth a watch (conspirators is still my fav):
as you can imagine, food and sex play a large role in his art—both emphasized by exaggerated slurping and moaning sounds (there’s also a bunch tongue stuff….my dude loves him some caressing disembodied tongues)—while he’s also big on using structural repetition to illustrate each film’s thesis. in addition to his first feature-length movie being an alice in wonderland adaptation, coming-of-age stories also seem to be big with him. which makes a lot of sense when you think about it: here’s a dude who seemingly finds endless joy in sharing tactile experiences the viewer has almost certainly never engaged in, bridging the impossible gap between vision and other senses as a mission statement in his visual art. his whole filmography is kind of just an extended interpretation of that thing where you encounter a surface in public that you’re dying to know what it feels like, but are too embarrassed to touch because you’re an adult and it will look weird.
much in the same way his characters—adults included—seek out or are otherwise subjected to new sensual experiences, I feel a lot like one of the conspirators when I watch his movies. sometimes I just have to take the L and screen one of these movies for myself, since there’s really no way of pitching them without making them sound way hornier than they actually are (there’s very rarely anything overtly sexual in them, tho they have gotten significantly hornier since his wife died in 2005). other times I just write up a meandering newsletter piece in hopes that the reader’s curiosity will get the best of them.
side note: speaking of his wife, svankmajer was married for 40 years to a woman named eva who collaborated with him up until her death. damn, look at this picture of them together:
she was a visual artist and surrealist author (highly recommend baradla cave if you can find a copy) who created insanely cool film posters for jan and his czech new wave peers. here’s one she did for his 2000 feature little otik that I would love to own a print of:
anyway, as I was saying re: feeling compelled to write a newsletter about jan svankmajer, I guess I wanted to make this a piece about that perverse sense of personal pleasure explored in these movies, and I figured the best way to so was by recounting my recent experience watching jan’s movie surviving life (theory and practice) for the first time, a project he spent years struggling to secure financing for before giving up and swapping the proposed plan of stop-motion-animating all the non-live-action scenes—emphasizing strange textures, I’m sure—for a less expensive plan of stop-motion-animating cutouts of pictures of each of the film’s actors. he released the movie back in 2010 (a few years before I watched one of his movies and then also all of the rest of his other movies), but it’s been totally unavailable to watch in this country since.
enter—weirdly—zola jesus, who tweeted about a cool site called easterneuropeanmovies.com a few years back, which I just recently had the idea to check for the availability of the svank oeuvre. sure enough, surviving life is streaming on there, as is insects, his 2018 follow up and final movie which I didn’t even know had ever been released. there’s also just an infinite scroll of all of the coolest movie posters—and works of art more generally—I have ever seen in my life. look at this shit:
to make the most of the experience of watching a gross little movie that is geared towards no one in my life but me, and which I’d been dying to see for a literal decade, I intentionally watched surviving life while holed up in my apartment on a friday night, by myself. here’s my official gbogn-stylized take:
surviving life (theory and practice) dir. jan svankmajer (2010) oddly the second movie I’ve seen this week that opens with a guy explaining the weird thing you’re about to see. mid-life crisis science of sleep as told with waking life’s jarring and frequently changing visual style and featuring the unexplained weird little guys scooting across the background of yellow submarine (let’s throw cronenberg in the gumbo too just because he’s another director who spent his career channeling freud before hitting middle age and being like fuck it and writing him directly into a script). love a movie like this where the plot spirals around on itself with parallels between two realities—in this case waking life and dreams—bc it makes me feel smart when I make those connections, which I can’t ever seem to do in like….crime movies or anything that involves remembering clues. this is legit an incredible movie—I always assumed the reason it was so unavailable was because it was so incomplete but this is literally just a movie
and for the sake of my initial point about screenshots (something, for the record, I capture whenever possible for the blurbs in this newsletter), here are a few other grabs I took from the movie:
naturally, I watched insects too. here’s my dumbass little blurb:
insect dir. jan svankmajer (2018) oddly the third movie I’ve seen this week that opens with a guy explaining the weird thing you’re about to see. really less a narrative film than an excuse to intercut a loose script with bts shot of jan with his crew creating visual and sound effects that reveal, after 50+ years of filmmaking, how lighthearted these projects really are (even feels like it’s part of the joke that the movie’s storyline is about a high-strung director shouting at his cast). relatively little animation in this, which I would guess is again due to budget constraints tho I also think in a way it works in the movie’s favor since every time anything’s animated they cut to the crew painstakingly setting up the shot, showing us how fucking hard it is to make a jan svankmajer movie. jan seems like such a fun dude—love that he spliced in interviews with the cast recounting their dreams, that thing almost every single other person would not be interested in hearing about
ok and one more screenshot:
I guess what this experience makes me think of is the daily occurrence of logging onto music twitter and seeing the whole TL freaking out about an album being reissued/otherwise excavated for the first time by an artist I have never heard of in my entire life and struggling to understand what that feels like to fans of that artist (pretty sure my shortlist of unattainable albums is entirely rooted in the blog era, and I’m almost certain that no one remembers any of the artists on there, and that’s probably for the best). it’s like I’ve finally unlocked the ability to empathize with the annoying archeologist guy in action movies that recognizes the item one of the dumb hot people stumbles upon and explains in way too much detail what it is and how they never thought they’d see it with their own eyes.
the feeling, in a word, is ‘good.’ yeah, the movie’s good too, but this felt like a significant moment in my relationship to media in that it closes one of the first meaningful chapters I ever opened in film (svankmajer has been saying for a while that insects would be his final movie…..dude is 87, I believe him)—one that specifically felt like my first deviation from pursuing what was quote-unquote the best in favor of what most appealed to me on instinct. whether it’s music or movies or, idk, what else is there, NFTs?, I can only hope you all have had a similar experience. and if you haven’t, I’m sorry you read all this. at least you now know what a chicken would look like with human breasts lmao