Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer is known to animate any sort of thing: leaves, the surface of a wall, socks, nails and raw flesh. But he does not limit himself to inanimate objects; he also stop animates live actors through a technique called pixilation. This article examines the performances of Švankmajer's pixilated actors within the 1992 short, Food, which constructs a dialectic between the agency of the actor and that of the animator. The author argues that Švankmajer undermines embodied autonomy, positing limits to human agency and suggesting that the boundaries of our bodies are more permeable than we like to think.
Lewis Jacobs (1906–97) was an American film critic, historian, and filmmaker. Jacobs initially studied painting and design, and his first foray into cinema was through the Philadelphia Cinema Crafters, an amateur film club founded in the late 1920s (the first record of its existence in the Amateur Cinema League dates from 1928). In 1930, he co-founded the short-lived periodical Experimental Cinema with poet and fellow cine-enthusiast David Platt. Much of the content of Experimental Cinema dealt with Soviet montage film, but it also contained essays on filmmaking aesthetics, international directors, and workers’ film societies both in the United States and abroad. The final issue in 1935 was largely devoted to Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! and published Eisenstein’s full scenario for the film. During the 1930s, Jacobs was involved with leftist film organizations in New York and made several documentaries and experimental films, including Footnote to Fact (1934). Jacobs began publishing film criticism during this period in The New York Times, his articles frequently focussing on directors like D.W. Griffith. In 1939, he published The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History. A technical, industrial, and aesthetic history; like Jacobs’ newspaper criticism, the book pays special attention to key American directors. Jacobs continued making films into the 1960s, wrote and edited books on the aesthetics of cinema and on documentary, was an early contributor to Hollywood Quarterly (subsequently renamed Film Quarterly), and taught film at the City College of New York, New York University, and the Philadelphia College of Art.
Jan Švankmajer (1934–) is a Czech surrealist visual artist, primarily known for his film works. He studied puppetry and theatre at university and began his career working in Prague theatre. In 1964, he made his first short film, The Last Trick of Mr. Schwarzewald and Mr. Edgar (Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara), and over the next few decades, he continued to make short films. Many of these are stop motion animations featuring everyday objects like chairs, suits, or raw meat, and were occasionally banned by the socialist authorities for their alleged subversiveness. In 1970, he and his wife Eva Švankmajerová (1940–2005) joined the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group. He has participated in many of the group’s exhibitions and writes poems and essays for its publication, Analogon. After working exclusively in shorts for almost 25 years, Švankmajer directed his first feature-length film in 1988, Alice (Něco z Alenky), inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. He has gone on to direct five additional feature-length films, and as of this writing, is in production for his seventh, an adaptation of Karel and Josef Čapek’s satirical play, Pictures from the Insects’ Life. All of his features include stop motion animation sequences.
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