Jan Svankmajer’s mind is something that you wouldn’t want to peek in. There are giant carnivorous tree creatures, men with fetishes for objects with rough surfaces and women with a thing for carps. Watching the Czech surrealist’s films there is a question that keeps ringing in our ears: is there a method to Svankmajer’s madness? With his sometimes sadistic, oftentimes weird visions Svankmajer’s films aren’t for people expecting talking and dancing animals unless those animals are devouring a person.

Svankmajer has been hailed as the “alchemist of the surreal”. His films have a wonderful blend of surrealism, horror and paranoia. Jan Svankmajer has combined many styles; live action, clay animation, stop motion and traditional animation. Born in Prague in 1934 to a window dresser father and a dress maker mother, he received a toy puppet theatre as a Christmas gift in 1942 starting a life-long obsession with puppetry. He trained at the Institute of Applied Arts from 1950 to 1954 and then at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. He soon became involved in the Theatre of Masks and the famous Black Theatre. Svankmajer made his first film in 1964 and for over thirty years has made some of the most unique animated films ever made. He's an inspiration to countless filmmakers from Tim Burton to Terry Gilliam.

His first feature film is “Alice” in 1988. Using Lewis Caroll's story he tells a compelling tale of a nightmarish story into a wold of childhood terrors. Caroll was a precursor of the surrealists and this was a match made for Svankmajer. And what a match it is. This is the Wonderland that you wish you'll never have to fall into. As Alice wanders around in and out of basements, all sense of space is lost. There are doors within doors. Perhaps Alice is in a Mobius loop. Strange artifacts abound. Alice is transformed not only by growing in size but by appearing as a girl, a doll and an effigy.

“Little Otik” is Svankmajer's take on a Czech fairy tale about a childless couple who adopt a tree stump that looks like a baby. Here in this film, Svankmajer's talent in black comedy is in full display. The opening sequence of a baby being manhandled as a market commodity is sheer genius. The film is both a fairy tale and a moral against too much permissiveness in parenthood. When the little “baby” grows to unimaginable proportions the efforts of the parents to hide little Otik reaches the comic. But it is the film's charm that can make such unrealism lie easy with the humdrum characters that populate the film.

In “Conspirators of Pleasure” Svankmajer’s dark and troubling imagination is in full display. The film unerringly looks at the hidden obsessions that otherwise normal looking people possess and manages to poke fun at their situation. The film was banned by outraged Czech authorities. “Conspirators” follows six outwardly normal and respectable residents of Prague as they engage their innermost bizarre sexual fantasies.

Although there is less animation in “Conspirators…” than there is in “Little Otik”, the animated scenes provide the contrast between the violence that the characters harbor in them and the banal appearance they present to the outside world. Svankmajer’s use of stop motion lends the appropriate surreal air to the film. Making the dummies come to life and subsequently killing them drives home the fact that even the most hidden secrets have a way of coming out of the open. When the woman whose effigy was killed by a thrown rock is actually killed by the same method there is the caveat that real life has a way of catching up.

“Conspirators…” has several main characters; each with their own twisted desires. Each of these characters is bound in the underground fraternity of depravity that is only broken up by the appearance of death. Svankmajer seems to revel in turning society upside down. With his short film “Food” he criticized modern society’s dehumanizing nature. In “Conspirators…” perversity is constructive and natural to the social order. Trying to stamp out perversity is futile since it has a way of returning. Political critique aside, “Conspirators of Pleasure” is a deeply satisfying black comedy that is disturbing in the fact that such material could be funny. Such is the genius of Jan Svankmajer that he could make a man with a chicken mask the most unnatural thing in the world.