09/09/2010

Jan Svankmajer is one of the greatest animated film directors in the world, a master in the art of stop motion. The Prague-born filmmaker, who presented his extraordinarily surrealistic creation Greedy Guts at Venice in 2000, returns in world premiere out of competition with Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a "psychoanalytic comedy", according to its subtitle, suspended between dream and reality.

Mature man Evzen (Vaklav Helsus) discovers a way to enter his own dreams at any time, while his psychoanalyst tries to interpret them. Evzen delves into his childhood and his relationship with his father and suicidal mother. But his wife asks him to make a choice between dream and reality. And Evzen decides to live forever in his dreams.

Svankmajer’s sixth feature Surviving Life is the first not to be made in collaboration with his wife Eva. Using the technique of collage, it fuses live-action scenes and animated images by Martin Kublàk, Eva Jakoubkova and Jaroslav Mràzek. The results are surprising.

At the start of the film, Svankmajer himself appears to ironically warn viewers that the technical choices are not down to matters of style but of budget, that the film is psychoanalytical because a psychoanalyst features in it and her participation is not a meta-reflection but a necessary addition due to the insufficient length of the film.

"Our society no longer trusts dreams, if they can’t be capitalised", says Svankmajer. "But, as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg suggests, only the fusion of dream and reality can create a full human life".

(Translated from Italian)