Posts Tagged ‘Jan Švankmajer’
Švankmajer in Manchester
Well, not the man himself, but a rare chance to see some of Jan Švankmajer's shorts in 35mm, preceded by a talk from yours truly about the use of movement in his films. It's part of the concurrent Moves09 festival, which this year is exploring the narrative possibilities of movement on screen. I'm still finalising the details, so I can't give [...]
Short Animated World
I've just discovered the Short Animated World blog, dedicated to chronicling all 100 entries on the recent Annecy Film Festival/Studio Magazine/Variety poll of thirty animation historians to establish the best animated films of all time. There's no original critical material, but each entry offers links and - in most cases - a streaming copy of [...]
A Švankmajer timeline
During a routine office spring-clean last week, I came across an elaborate timeline that I drew up earlier this year, setting events in the life and career of Jan Švankmajer against a wider backdrop of Czech history and culture of the time.It began life as a crib sheet to help those baffled by the historical references in his 1990 film The Death [...]
Jan Švankmajer interview
Previously hidden behind a subscriber-only wall, the interview that I conducted with Jan Švankmajer for Vertigo magazine earlier this year (it was originally published in the Spring 2007 issue) now seems to be freely accessible. Great illustrations, too - though with this subject you're a bit spoilt for choice!
Update
Apologies for the lack of updates - things have been insanely busy over the past fortnight, what with the Ken Russell retrospective at BFI Southbank (for which I contributed a 75-minute illustrated talk and met the man himself a few days later) and various other work-related things - including an interview about Jan Švankmajer for MovieMail's [...]
Sight & Sound on Lunacy
OK, I promise the next few posts will be about someone other than Jan Švankmajer, but the BFI has just uploaded a selection from the current Sight & Sound onto its website, including my extended review of Lunacy. (And I should also link to, and enthusiastically recommend, Kinoblog commenter David Sorfa's far more exhaustive analysis on the [...]
BFI Švankmajer DVD in Czech media
I'm taking it on trust that this interview with me in Czech daily paper Hospodářské noviny does a reasonable job of conveying what I originally said in English... Closer to home, more rave reviews of the Švankmajer DVD box have appeared in The Scotsman and Teletext, as well as today's Metro (page 30) - though not, for some reason, the online [...]
Eye For Film on Jan Švankmajer
I'm hoping to have a post on the dystopian sci-fi films of Polish filmmaker Piotr Szulkin published very soon (I watched four key titles last week, and they're fascinating on all sorts of levels) - but in the meantime another long review of the Švankmajer DVD set has just been published. It's by Anton Bitel, and it's on the Eye For Film site.
DVD Times on Jan Švankmajer
This is the first full-length online review of the BFI's new triple-disc Jan Švankmajer: The Complete Short Films. Actually, that's a bit of an understatement - with 5,000 words spread over four pages, it must be one of the longest reviews ever posted on DVD Times. Believe me, that's not a complaint! It's officially released next Monday, but [...]
Marina Warner on Jan Švankmajer
On Saturday, The Guardian published what is by a very considerable margin the longest and most eloquent piece on Jan Švankmajer's work ever seen in the pages of a British newspaper. In the print version, Marina Warner's article occupied the double-page centre spread of the Review section, illustrated with three large stills, but the full text is [...]