The Architectural Setting as an Embodied Topography of the Imagination in Two Films of Jan Svankmajer.
Dagmar Motycka Weston, University of Edinburgh
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Abstract
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The work of the well-known Czech filmmaker and artist Jan Svankmajer is informed by is surrealist preoccupation with the primary phenomena of embodiment, experience and the imagination. He believes that he apparently inanimate things and places that we encounter in the given world have a life of their own. Having witnessed certain events, and been touched by people in different psychic states, they accumulate memories which they are then able to communicate to us. He always emphasizes the most primary senses — in particular touch and hearing — above vision, and delights in obliterating the artificial boundary between “inner” and “outer” experience, between reality and dream. Svankmajer often portrays the architectural settings in his films — the always-animate world in which is stories are played out — as the echoes and extensions of his characters’ landscapes of the imagination, so that in some cases they almost become characters in their own right. In doing this, he is intuitively alluding to the presence of a latent world, in which human experience and imagination are situated. As with the topography of dream, the structure of places within the stories is often disjointed and disorientating. In his use of architecture, Svankmajer is particularly attuned to deep symbolic archetypes — the dark cavern, the tower, the theater of the world — which are part of the latent world. The paper briefly examines Svankmajer’s thematic sources — particularly Mannerism and Surrealism — for their understanding of the mysterious and animate nature of the experiential world. It then interprets the structure of Svankmajer’s topography in two of his short films, Into the Cellar and The Fall of the House of Usher. Throughout, the author draws on her acquaintance with the filmmaker.
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Author biography
Dr. Dagmar Motycka Weston was born in Prague. She qualified and practiced as an architect in Toronto, before taking up postgraduate studies at the Architectural Association and the University of Cambridge. She teaches architectural history and design at the University of Edinburgh. She believes that architecture must be situated in culture and understood in reciprocity with the humanities. She is interested in ways in which the history and philosophy of architecture can fruitfully inform contemporary design. Her current research interests resolve around the issues of modernity: embodiment, spatiality, the loss of the symbolic tradition, and efforts to restore meaning in architecture through metaphor. Dagmar has written widely on the various conjunctions between Surrealism and architecture. Her current research project is a book on the theme of the artist’s and architect’s studio and personal museum in the early 20th century as a matrix of creativity.