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Dark Alchemy

By Peter Hames

Dark Alchemy Film, Art & Culture

Dark Alchemy

By Peter Hames

Only 1 item left in stock
Description
Czech animator Jan Svankmajer is one of the most distinctive and influential of contemporary filmmakers. As a leading member of the Prague Surrealist Group, his work is linked to a rich avant-garde tradition and an uncompromising moral stance that brought frequent tensions with the authorities in the normalization years following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Svankmajer's formative influences have been the pre-war surrealists, the Prague of Rudolf II, experimental theatre, folk puppetry and, above all, the political traumas of the past 50 years. Like his contemporaries-including playwright president Vaclav Havel, and, in exile, novelist Milan Kundera and filmmaker Milos Forman-Svankmajer's dominant life experiences have been the realities of the Stalinist system, both the explicit state terror of the 1950s and the Brezhnevist neo-Stalinism of the 1970s and the 1980s. After training in puppetry and working in the Prague theatre, he made his first film in 1964. He directed a number of important films in the 1960s, including the live-action and Kafkaesque Byt (The Flat, 1968) and Zahrada (The Garden, 1968) and consolidated his international reputation with Moznosti dialogu (Dimensions of Dialogue) in 1982. Since then, he has continued his highly visual and poetic approach in two feature-length films, Neco z Alenky (Alice, 1987) and Lekce Faust (Faust, 1994). As a filmmaker, Svankmajer is constantly exploring and analyzing his concern with power, fear and anxiety, confrontation and destruction, magic, the irrational and the absurd, and displays a bleak outlook on the possibilities for dialogue. In challenging accepted narrative, the bourgeoisie of realism (nezval), and the thematic and formal conventions of the mainstream media, Svankmajer's work is startlingly dynamic, subversive, and confrontational.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
226
Release Date:
1995-08-30
Publication Date:
1995-08-15
Publisher:
Praeger
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0275952991
ISBN13:
9780275952990
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Minimum Reading Age:
7
Maximum Reading Age:
17
Weight:
351 g
Height:
156 cm
Width:
234 cm
Thickness:
13 cm
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The items bear minimal signs of past use, such as light scratches or memories in the form of markings. These signs of wear give the items a charming character and tell stories of their previous owners, while not affecting their functionality.
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