Jan Švankmajer Movies

In stop-motion animation, a wardrobe moves through the countryside. It arrives in a house, a child's voice recites Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," and...

The Dung Beetle is late, the Parasite is asleep and Mrs Larva is more interested in her knitting than the director’s instructions. It’s...

A man is trapped in a sinister flat where nothing seems to obey the laws of nature.

A non-narrative voyage round Sedlec Ossuary, which has been constructed from over 50,000 human skeletons (victims of the Black Death).

A small, animated figure learns how to use a whip, a pair of wings and a house.

Robert is a SF writer, who realizes that he can make his thoughts material. Because of that, a group of aliens arrives to Earth. Their leader is...

"The Castle of Otranto" is animation/short/mockumentary based on "The Castle of Otranto", a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole, the first Gothic novel. The...

The age-old story of Don Juan, played by giant puppets.

An eight-part animated portrait of various species, accompanied by a different style of music. The various parts are: Aquatilia (foxtrot), Hexapoda...

A man plays the Bach piece of the title on the organ, accompanied by images of stone walls with cracks and holes that grow and shrink, intercut with...

A little girl goes down to the basement cellar to fetch some potatoes, and finds all her hidden fears about the cellar depicted in animated form.

Animated drawings inspired by Leonardo da Vinci are intercut with seemingly unrelated (but in fact strangely similar) live-action scenes.

This half-hour BBC documentary offers a revealing look at Svankmajer at work on "Death of Stalinism in Bohemia," and uses excerpts from his earlier...

An animated film compiled by David Ehrlich consisting of 27 animators from different countries all explaining themselves through their animation.

In this animated version of Edgar Allan Poe's story, a traveller arrives at the Usher mansion to find that the sibling inhabitants are living under a...

A look at the legendary Czech sound designer and his profession. Editor and documentary filmmaker Adéla Špaljová has her father...

In this early stop-motion film by Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer, a device consisting of a clock, a pendulum, a faucet and a bucket enacts a series...

The last moments of a creature made out of fruits and vegetables.

A bust of Stalin is cut open on an operating table, leading to an elaborate animated depiction of Czech history from 1948 (the Communist takeover) to...