A GAME OF STONES

After studying at the Institute of Industrial Arts and the Marionette Faculty of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s, Jan Svankmajer started working as a theater director, chiefly in association with the Theatre of Masks and the Black Theatre. He first experimented with film-making after becoming involved with the mixed-media productions of Prague’s “Lanterna Magika” Theatre. He began making short films in 1964, and continued working in the same medium for over twenty years, when he finally achieved his long-held ambition to make a feature film based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (Neco z Alenky, 1988). He has also exhibited his drawings, collages and ‘tactile sculptures’, many of which were produced in the mid-1970s, when he was temporarily banned from filmmaking by the Czech authorities. He has been a card-carrying member of the Prague Surrealist Group since 1969. In 2006, the 47th Thessaloniki FIlm Festival presented a great retrospective tribute to his work.