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Third
Keswick Film Festival
15-17 February 2002 |
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Faust
Programme Notes
By Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University
AJan Svankmajer lives in a creaky surrealist's castle of illusions and mortifications. That "castle" is set in a gloomy corner of Czechoslovakia in the foothills of a landscape he might have named himself: the Mountains of the Mother of God. It is a decaying manor house, forfeited to him by gypsies who had let their animals roam its hallways. There, in a personal Black Museum, with his wife, Eva, and his children, he quietly produces an outpouring of weird art in several media, including ceramics, sculpture, painting, collages, stuffed birds, bones, skulls, and even assemblages of fruit and vegetables, with the works of other artists nearly as perverse as he filling its dank cellars and silent cloisters. And there he practices the lively black arts of animation. In films such as DIMENSIONS OF DIALOGUE (1982), THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1980), and THE DEATH OF STALINISM IN BOHEMIA (1990), severed limbs do sprightly danses macabre and plates full of food organize themselves into anthropomorphic, psychotic pageants. FAUST (1994) is his most ambitious nightmare yet, a refashioning of one of surrealism's sacred texts out of materials Svankmajer has had lying about the cobwebby attic of his imagination since his youth.
That youth (Svankmajer was born in 1934) was first twisted by the German occupation,
and then by the long gray ennui of the Soviet epoch. Early on, Svankmajer fell
into the most marvelous bad company, a band of renegade intellectuals determined
to slander the rigidly idiotic Stalinist mind through allegory and absurdity.
The Czech Surrealists adopted Svankmajer during his student days at the Institute
of Applied Arts in the early 50s, and by the time he moved on to the Prague
Academy of Performing Arts, he was thoroughly immersed in puppetry as medium
of social criticism. His puppet and marionette shows at the Theatre of Masks,
the Black Theatre, and the Laterna Magika in Prague made him an underground
celebrity, his style shaped by figures as diverse as the surrealist painter
Arcimboldo and Lewis Carroll. Svankmajer moved to animation in 1964, where he
worked relatively unhindered, for his satires on official hypocrisy were so
oblique that the literalist state authorities had only a faint suspicion they
were being burlesqued, a suspicion they only rarely acknowledged, and then in
ways that only confirmed their thickheadedness. (Svankmajer recounts with a
smirk that in 1972s LEONARDO'S DIARY, he was forced to change a hockey game
to a football match, because the Czechs had just drubbed the Soviets in Olympic
hockey.) With his move into features in 1987, Svankmajer began painting on a
wider canvas, but his vision remains as kinked and uncanny as ever.
Svankmajer caresses FAUST, savoring the story's inherent grotesqueness. Scrambling
together equal parts Gounod, Marlowe and Goethe with a tincture of Charles Addams,
half opera, half comic book, Svankmajer's FAUST becomes part of an ongoing personal
project to "return art to the level of magic ritual," while at the
same time "carrying on an active dialogue with my own childhood."
Because that childhood was an Absurdist tapestry of sexual fantasies and material
deprivation, FAUST revels in memories of repressed passions and bizarre, indulgent
fancies about food and bodies, delightful perversions in which the "normal"
must always come equipped with quotation marks. It is set in Prague, the ancestral
home of surrealism, Kafka's city, "a city," says Svankmajer lovingly,
"of magic, alchemy, and hermetics."
Svankmajer calls himself "a militant surrealist," and this film is
a wildly expressive externalizing of the unacknowledged and the unspeakable.
Here, Faust is not a court figure, but a Czech everyman, a schlemiel first seen
in a subway. His problem, says Svankmajer, is everyone's: "sooner or later,
everyone is faced with same dilemma: either to live their life in conformity
with the misty promises of institutionalized 'happiness' or to rebel and take
the path away from civilization, whatever the results." Svankmajer is bemused
by the inanities of the well-upholstered "lifestyles" of modern capitalism,
but the fear and desire begotten by this longing is a very serious matter for
the storyteller: "When any civilization feels its end is growing near,
it returns to its beginnings and looks to see whether the myths on which it
is founded can be interpreted in new ways which would give them a new energy
and ward off the impending catastrophe." But, like any mythology designed
to service a particular society at a specific moment, unintended meaning slips
through the leaky seams of the Faust story, says Svankmajer: "The repressive
civilization it is based on brings with it so many psychological problems it
deforms man's spirit, so do the advantages of civilization sufficiently outweigh
what man has lost?" This rhetorical invocation of spiritual abandonment
stalks this sad and beautiful film. It is the artist's job to be the skeleton
at the feast of modernity, believes Svankmajer, and in his dedication to this
responsibility, he reveals himself to be much more the moralist than the cynic.
Because the Faust story is such a core myth for humanity, Svankmajer makes his
Devil man's alter ego, a brother to the man-child, with his foibles and fleshly
yearnings, and a foil for God-the-father, who is a distant and dour disciplinarian.
In a strangely affective way, the Devil is the protagonist in Svankmajer's bent
but sympathetic theology.
In order to show the gravity of the choice Faust faces, Svankmajer lingers on
the pure "thingness" of the objects that surround and tempt Faust.
He has, he says, "a belief that places, rooms, and objects have their own
passive lives which they have soaked up, as it were, from the situation they
have been in, and the people who made, touched, and lived with them." Svankmajer
announces through FAUST that he prefers to "deal with dead things rather
than with live people. . . I am a necrophile." Somehow, in Jan Svankmajer's
FAUST, this fascination with dead things touches the living heart; like FRANKENSTEIN,
it is the kind of horrific art that truly animates the human spirit.
Svankmajer made his second feature, Faust, over a protracted schedule plagued with mysterious and inexplicable accidents, including two suicide attempts by crew members (one successful), cameraman Svatopluk Maly breaking the camera (and five teeth) after tripping on flat ground, and the terminal illness of lead actor Petr Cepek (who would die during the week of the film's Czech premiere). Producer Jaromír Kallista also had his car stolen (the thief ran over his dog in the process) - but Svankmajer says: "Let's be realistic - we can't blame it all on Faust!"
Written and Directed by Jan Svankmajer
Based on the plays by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the
novel by Christian Dietrich Grabbe, old Czech puppet plays,
and the opera by Chales Gounod
Produced by Jaromir Kallista, Photographed by Svatopluk Maly
Edited by Marie Zemanova, Designed by Eva Svankmajerova and Jan Svankmajer
Sound by Ivo Spalj, Animated by Bedrich Glaser
Music by Charles Gounod and J. S. Bach
Cast: Petr Cepek, Jan Kraus, Vladimir Kudla, Antonin Zacpal, Jiri Suchy
English Voices by Andrew Sachs
"In the old magicians' books, they say that if we wish to exorcise a demon or a ghost, then we have to give them a name… and I think that is precisely the method I use to get rid of my anxieties and fears. I give them a name in my films. " - Jan Svankmajer
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©
Keswick Film Club 2002
Keswick Film Club is a voluntarily-run, not-for-profit organisation.
Registered Charity Number 1083395