If you’re at a very loose end next Wednesday (13th), I’ll be part of a four-strong panel discussing the work of Jan Švankmajer at BFI Southbank, along with:
- Suzanne Buchan, head of the Animation Research Centre at University College for the Creative Arts (her piece ‘Shifting Realities: The Brothers Quay Between Live Action and Animation’ is available here)
- Peter Hames, author of The Czechoslovak New Wave and, more pertinently, editor of Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer (whose second edition is out early next year from Wallflower Press)
- Donna Roberts of Essex University, curator of the recent exhibition ‘Jan Švankmajer and Eva Švankmajerová: Communicating Vessels’, for which she wrote this introduction (PDF).
And here’s the official blurb:
The ‘cabinet of curiosities’ or Wunderkammer has played a major role in Jan Švankmajer’s surrealist art, the juxtaposition of its natural, artificial and scientific objects, evoking poetic and imaginative connections. Dr Suzanne Buchan leads a panel of artists and researchers into Švankmajer’s cabinet to shed new light on the irrational objects of his imagination, from their origins in the Mannerist world of Emporor Rudolf II’s Prague, to their dialogue with artists creating alchemical transformations in their work across media.
More info here – and here’s the main page for the BFI’s Švankmajer retrospective as a whole. I can also confirm that the BFI’s upcoming DVD, Jan Švankmajer: The Complete Short Films (which I produced) already exists in its final packaged version, and will definitely hit its June 25th release date.