The Death and Rebirth of Surrealism in Bohemia: Local Inflections and Cosmopolitan Aspirations in the Cinema of Jan Svankmajer

摘要

Since the mid 1980s Jan Svankmajer's work has attracted the attention of connoisseurs and aficionados of surrealism across the globe. This essay complicates the idea of Svankmajer's universal surrealist appeal by considering it in its specific historical and geopolitical context. It argues that Svankmajer's surrealism has a local, yet emphatically cosmopolitan, inflection. A recognition of this local specificity is not only crucial to a more informed reception of Svankmajer's cinema, it also affords a better understanding of the vicissitudes of surrealism in general, and Czech surrealism in particular. This reading of Svankmajer's work identifies a space where a politicised, rather than utterly commodified, surrealist practice is still possible.