Movies: Jan Švankmajer

A quiet young English girl named Alice finds herself in an alternate version of her own reality after chasing a white rabbit. She becomes surrounded by living inanimate objects and stuffed dead animals, and must find a way out of this nightmare — no ...

A human body gradually reconstructs itself as its various component parts crowd themselves into a small room and eventually, after much experimentation, sort out which part goes where....

When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife's pain, the man finds a piece of root in the backyard and chops it and varnishes it into the shape of a child. However the woman takes the root a...

A three-part depiction of various forms of communication....

Six outwardly average individuals have elaborate fetishes they indulge with surreptitious care. A mousy letter carrier makes dough balls she grotesquely ingests before bed. A shop clerk fixates on a TV news reader while he builds a machine to massage...

When famous detective Nick Carter visits Prague, he becomes involved in strange case of a missing dog and even stranger carnivorous plant. He becomes convinced that he is standing against his greatest enemy, the Gardener, who supposedly died years ag...

BREAKFAST: After eating breakfast, a man is transformed into an elaborate dumb-waiter-style breakfast dispenser - and the same fate befalls the man who obtains breakfast from him. LUNCH: After failing to catch the waiter's eye, two would-be diners en...

A very free adaptation of Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus', Goethe's 'Faust' and various other treatments of the old legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil. A nondescript man is lured by a strange map into a sinister puppet theatre, where he find...

A small, animated figure learns how to use a whip, a pair of wings and a house....

The story takes place entirely on a kitchen counter and sees two slices of raw meat as protagonists. The first slice is courted by the second and together they dance to the notes of a recording from the 1920s broadcast on the radio, after which the t...

An eight-part animated portrait of various species, accompanied by a different style of music. The various parts are: Aquatilia (foxtrot), Hexapoda (bolero), Pisces (blues), Reptilia (tarantella), Aves (tango), Mammalia (minuet), Simiae (polka) and H...

A little girl goes down to the basement cellar to fetch some potatoes, and finds all her hidden fears about the cellar depicted in animated form....

A doctor is shocked when his beloved colleague Mima signs a contract with foreign car manufacturer Ferat, in order to work for them as a rally-driver. A scientist convinces him that human blood is being used as fuel for Mima's ever winning car, but d...

A man takes up residence with a mysterious marquis and is soon persuaded to enter into an asylum for preventative therapy. Things are not what they seem, and the marquis may be even more sinister than what the young man may've predicted....

A non-narrative voyage round Sedlec Ossuary, which has been constructed from over 50,000 human skeletons (victims of the Black Death)....

In this early stop-motion film by Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer, a device consisting of a clock, a pendulum, a faucet and a bucket enacts a series of events whenever the clock chimes....

Two puppets, Punch and Judy, do battle to the death over the custody of a live guinea pig....

It is a story of three veterans released from the army. During one night spent camping in the country they one by one wake up and meet three elvish brothers. Each of the veterans is given a magic item - one gets magic harp that provides him with serv...

A man plays the Bach piece of the title on the organ, accompanied by images of stone walls with cracks and holes that grow and shrink, intercut with images of doors and wire-meshed windows....

In 1897, in a castle near the town of Werewolfville in the Carpithians, a slightly deranged Professor Orfanik experiments with his new inventions which include, even at this early date, television and a film camera. He is also an obsessed opera fan, ...