Well it seems that as well as being the longest running and bestest IFFR blog on this beautiful fucked up planet, this website is fast becoming the world’s number one english language Švankblog and personally i quite like the idea that in the distant future when western europe is merely a chain of deserted swampy ruins and man is totally wiped out, aliens will arrive, find the internet is still working and start reading this blog. They will no doubt think that Švankmajer made honest faithful documentaries of the beast called man.
So welcome aliens. The year right now is 2019.
This exhibition at the EYE in Amsterdam was very well curated and if you are going I would advise giving it at least an afternoon, maybe even a whole day if you want to watch all the shorts, since the expo includes a bunch of them. And even if you know the shorts quite well, even if you have seen Dimensions of Dialogue a million times, it is pretty cool to see it publicly and hear the gasps and chuckles of the other spectators 🙂
My one critique of the curation would be that the sound bleeds from one projection to the next, but then at the same time this becomes another part of the overwhelming nature of the expo. It really is intense seeing so much at once (We had to take a drinks break!), both the films and also Svank’s artworks which seem to fall into several very different phases.
There are of course the tactile objects made when he was banned from film-making for seven years and also fascinating artworks from the 1960s and the present day.
To begin at the beginning, in the 1960s Svank was making weird voodoo inspired stuff made from cornflour, dirt and blood. Some of the objects seem very powerful and disturbing. One piece composed of kitchen implements covered in goop in a drawer feels like a vision of hell. Didn’t get a photo of that, I was too scared/scarred.
An aspect of his work i hadn’t seen before were the wooden 3D paintings which looked amazing and made me think that if Svank had done a Forman or a Nemec and gone West, maybe he would have become a Basquiat style figure in modern art. Seriously.
But luckily enough he didn’t he stayed put and made amazing stuff. I got to see Virile Games, which i had missed during the Svank retrospective in Brighton in 2013 because they announced the screening at the wrong time. It’s great, a hilarious spoof on football and violence. Also worth noting is that Svank was making cat videos DECADES before anyone else!!
Last Trick is practically the first thing you see when entering the exhibition, which pleased me since it is one of my fave Svank shorts. Like many but not all of his films, it features two protagonists in a dispute which ends in delicious violence. My absolute favourite, a Week in the Country, wasn’t selected.
He really does make stuff in a lot of styles, I wonder what his working practice is like, I have an image of him running around tinkering with a thousand different things. Also near the start of the exhibition were some hilarious porncollages.
Like i said earlier, another interesting thing to see was his latest experiments, which included a stoat stuffed with crystalline rock which reminded me of the one from 2013 and aboriginal dreamscape drawings. These were really in totally different style to everthing else, he is so talented! The paintings with the aboriginal style dots of paint still incorporated bones but now the animal matter has bene bleached clean! A fertile topic for a PhD dissertation. Also there were recent books which he has illustrated, including a Japanese version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland which looked completely demented!!
This exhibition was overwhelming and fantastic. At the closing time (1900) we drifted out with the staff who had also taken a moment to look at their favourite pieces. Maybe I’ll go back! It’s crazy to think that some of these artworks (some of them sitting on their very own tables) are over 50 years old! So Svank has kept them all that time in his presumably supercrazy atleier space!?
The exhibition is Brighton back in 2013 was great (you can read my review here of course) but this one is a definite improvement. We even got a free programme with writings by Svank that i haven’t even had time to check yet!
And unlike Brighton, it was good everything was under glass here so it can’t get nicked.
It is funny how me and Svank seem to keep on meeting up, in a virtual sense at least… we first met when i rolled home drunk when living in Prague and watched Conspirators of Pleasure on television and it blew my tiny mind, then there was the retrospective in Brighton, then the two IFFR visits and now this exhibition!
In fact you know what I am going change the blurb of the blog to make it easier for Svank scholars to find me.
i munch moovies 