Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010)

 

Director: Jan Švankmajer

Screenplay: Jan Švankmajer

Cast: Václav Helšus as Evžen and Milan; Klára Issová as Evženie; Zuzana Kronerová as Milada; Emília Došeková as Super-Ego; Daniela Bakerová as Dr. Holubová

An Abstract Candidate

 

I am the Chinese melon!

Ever since I discovered the short films of the Czeck filmmaker Jan Švankmajer 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 most of his career’s work too, 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 is one of his most idiosyncratic trademarks, and going into a Švankmajer work, you will both witness 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), Švankmajer 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. Švankmajer 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, Švankmajer's fan base met with an experimental tangent even 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, though with the advantage that, since they only needed to shot with the actors in a shorter span of time, they did not need to pay for catering because “photographs don’t eat".

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 Evžen (Václav Helšus) 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 Švankmajer 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 backgrounds to most of the moments, being created from two dimension images cut out and finished digitally on computers.  Just from the initial set up in one of Evžen's dreams – where giant female heads blow out watermelons from between their lips, and buildings switch sides on human feet, where teddy bears have long furry phalluses and chicken headed nude women run around – I am reminded of what an actual surrealist artist is as Švankmajer shows his skill with the craft.

This style of animation has been used by Švankmajer 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. Švankmajer has played with the concept of dreams in his filmography, but this is the first one where they are the central subject as well, which is another distinct part of the production. 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 Švankmajer's old age as a veteran, an 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 Švankmajer 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. The plot is incredibly idiosyncratic if graspable already, as Evžen fixated on this Eva/Eliza figure in his dreams, trying to dream more to fall in love with her, but by invoking the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Alongside having to literally fight a father personification who looks like himself and a variety of various neurosis to unpack, Freud and Jung are paid with respect if 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. Touches taken from psychology can add entire memorable side characters, the old woman in Evžen's dreams who is his superego, who collects all and is God/Brahma/Karl Marx/whatever is a symbol of all-knowing. There is also an entire layer of how depressing the real world is, both in the relationships in the real world, such as Evžen's wife thinking he is having an affair, to the reoccurring plot point of lottery tickets being the false hope for the better in real life and the dreams.

I am biased for Jan Švankmajer, but it is 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, that you see within Surviving Life. It is a film that came and sadly went without enough praise for it as it deserved, and wished his career gained more praise for how distinct productions like this were. To step into a Švankmajer 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. Surviving Life is, far from a work compromised by its budget as Švankmajer self decapitating says, but a masterpiece in a career already full of them.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Surrealist/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low) – High