THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 45

One of my favorite artists is the Czech film-maker Jan Svanjkmajer. He captures a visceral disgust & love for material reality that really brings out a specific, contradictory way of viewing the world. He transfers the ordinary disgust we feel towards things like snails, to common everyday things like eating, sex, animals & mouths. He makes me feel like a pervert with ordinary things, with soup. Jan Svanjkmajer also directed my favorite movie Faust. I love Goethe, but Jan Svankmajer led me to this work when I had no time for reading the classics & he presented such a bizarre but cohesive view of it that it has been my favorite film since I first saw it over twenty years ago. This was Svankmajer’s first feature film, it shows that “giving it my all” or “first album syndrome” that so many things are affected by. By combining live action with clay animation & stop-motion animation he is able to increase the surrealistic feeling a hundred fold. Svankmajer juxtaposes things like clay & bones, sawdust & beef tongues frequently. These things being present with each other in the same moment really plays into their own wildly different qualities. Everything in Svankmajer’s works seems weathered, worn, shabby with cracking paint. The paint is frequently that hospital green, cracking, makes me want everything to be that way. Maybe this is just how Czechoslovakia was in the 70s, 80s & 90s, maybe it’s an aesthetic decision, I don’t know. Film is a great vehicle for surrealism, the number of scenes that can be presented is amazing, allowing for maximum impact & really leaving the audience trying desperately to figure out what they’ve seen & how it relates to them. In this way it opens the viewer up to realms of possibility that they frequently aren’t able to access on their own, giving so many unfamiliar, unexpected cues. Svankmajer uses these tools expertly, to maximum effect. His films change you, you have no other option.