Time Machine Essay Proposal

For my time machine essay, I have decided to go for Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. Known best for his surreal animations and feature length films. In terms of relating it back to the ideas that were discussed in the lecture programme. I was thinking about return back to Freud and his theory of the uncanny. Much of Švankmajer’s work relies on images of the uncanny and the grotesque that sit just as easily in the Gothic area. Also I could discuss how and why Svankmajer work has greatly influenced other artists such as Tim Burton and the Quay Brothers. Also with more research into Svankmajer and his work, I may be able to relate back to other ideas that were discussed in the lecture programme. Here are just a few important quotes that I have found from my initial research into Svankmajer and the uncanny.

• "Unsurpassed in his tactile, uncanny approach to experimental animation, surrealist Czech master Jan Svankmajer's films have inspired a generation of directors, including Tim Burton and The Brothers Quay, to expand their confidence in what is visually and conceptually possible in cinema. Whether concerned with sexual taboos or blatant political satire, Svankmajer's vision is always off-kilter, mordantly funny, and oddly sincere" ( Thompson, 2007)

• Though Svankmajer can express himself in many media, the private dream world opened up by the screen has become for him a perfect space for improvised play. Like the surrealists - Svankmajer belongs to the last vigorous strand of that movement - he often adopts the viewpoint of a child to re-enchant experience. In works like Down to the Cellar (1983), a spooky masterpiece in which a little girl is sent to fetch coal and encounters certain other experiences, and in Alice (1988) and in Jabberwocky (1971), animation conveys this enhanced vividness and vitality - everything has inner life, and emanates an ambiguous mixture of menace and pleasure. (Warner, 2007)