The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer: Volume 1

The Early Years

For the past forty years, Jan Svankmajer (Alice and Little Otik) has been hailed as one of cinema's most consistently surprising, wildly imaginative and remarkable surrealists of our time. Utilizing a delirious combination of puppets, humans, stop-motion animation and live-action, Svankmajer's films conjure up a dreamlike universe that is at once dark, macabre, witty and perversely visceral. Kimstim is proud to offer this collection of remarkable short works from an artist that has mesmerized audiences the world over and has inspired filmmakers from the Brothers Quay to Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam.

Includes:

The Fall of the House of Usher

15 minutes, 1980

A Gothic fantasia based on the classic Edgar Allan Poe tale of horror.

A Game With Stones

9 minutes, 1965

Earth's genesis, development and destruction presented in the form of a bizarre "mechanical game".

Et Cetera

7 minutes, 1966

A rich and brilliant mediation on the futility of progress.

Punch and Judy

10 minutes, 1966

Two hand puppets quarrel over a real-life guinea pig in an exchange that soon escalates into a blood-thirsty feud.

The Flat

13 minutes, 1968

A Kafkaesque black comedy in which a man is held prisoner in an apartment where everyday objects turn against him.

Picnic With Weissmann

13 minutes, 1969

A picnic upon the debris of consumer civilization.

A Quiet Week In the House

19 minutes, 1969

Seven nights of ritualized voyeurism by a solitary terrorist in an abandoned house.