The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, Prague’s Alchemist of Film

Jan Švankmajer is a Czech film director, alchemic of surreal, master of stop-motion animation. The Quays willingly admit his influence on their art (stressing, however, that their actual initiation is due to animations by Starewicza and Borowczyka). As one of the subtitles says, in The Cabinet, the 16^th and 20^th centuries co-exist – Rudolphian Prague cohabits here with Czechoslovakia of the 1980s, Wertumnus by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) neighbours the colourful neon signs of Tuzex (a network of foreign currency shops), the Staropramen brewery and “Rudé právo” (Czechoslovakian communist daily). The title character himself is an animated puppet version of The Librarian, one of the most famous portraits by Arcimboldo. The film was made as a series of animated sequences opening particular parts of a one-hour documentary about Švankmajer. The Quays used music by Zdenek Liška (1922-1983), who frequently collaborated with the maker of Conspirators of Pleasure (Spiklenci slasti). The film salute by the Quays does not mimic the aesthetics of Švankmajer’s films – instead, those who love the brothers’ art will find a range of familiar motives in The Cabinet. A careful Polish viewer may notice the logo of Polish Pewex on the bag from which Švankmajer takes the “found objects”.

Jakub Mikurda