Faust

Jan Svankmajer (whose newest film, Little Otik, receives a limited American release later this year) is one of animation’s greatest living innovators. Though Milos Forman once described him in the equation “Disney + Bunuel = Svankmajer,” the true secret to this Czech animator’s importance is his utter indifference to the digitally- enhanced slickness that’s made the Disney brand so blandly reliable. Svankmajer’s films may function as shadow images of Disney films – exposing all the herky-jerky tawdriness and lurking menace that Disney works to suppress – but his true influences as an animator are other Eastern European stop-motion filmmakers such as Ladislaw Starewicz, whose shorts featuring reanimated skeletons and writhing garbage followed in the finest Grimm-Brothers tradition of planting violent nightmares in generations of impressionable young heads. A committed surrealist, Svankmajer reworks Starewicz’s dream imagery around his own special sensitivity for the most subconsciously volatile; he animates not only with skeletons, but with raw meat, false teeth, glass eyes. What’s most striking about Svankmajer thematically, though, is his infinite extension of the “animation” metaphor; just as an inanimate wooden puppet is made to jabber and dance by stop-motion trickery, real people are shown to be animated by dumb ritual or primordial passions. Scarcely aware of what they’re doing, Svankmajer’s unwashed and paunchy protagonists are dragged off ordinary streets and forced into playing stripped cogs in an ancient machine. Nowhere is this more evident than in Faust, possibly the director’s best feature-length work, in which a low-rent composite version of the Faust story runs perpetually in a subterranean community theater that seemingly underlies all of Prague. Filled with his usual numbing repetitions and textural close-ups, Faust is also the perfect vehicle for Svankmajer’s most enduring obsession: conveying the dark and cramped liminal spaces between the real and the unreal, the ordinary and the fantastic, the genuine and the fake. If this were a Disney film, or any American film, its maker would be hell-bent on sucking the viewer inside a world of perfectly-maintained illusion, but Svankmajer perversely revels in the cracks in his own illusions, jarring moments that highlight the artifice of every kind of “animation” and ask naughty questions about the identity of the primal animator.