[4] The author himself claims that the intersubjective communication between him and the viewer works only through evoked associations, and his films fulfil their subversive mission only when, even in the most fantastic moments, they look like a record of reality.

He then studied directing and stage design at the Department of Puppets at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (1954-1958), where Lander moved to as a teacher at that time.

Even during the most rigid Stalinist regime, the atmosphere at the school was liberal and forbidden books on French modern art circulated among the students, brought by the painting teacher Karel Tondl.

[17] In the second film from 1964, Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasia in G minor, the visual component is a kind of mannerist informel with a recognizable influence of surrealist photographs by Emila Medková.

[21] Between 1971 and 1989 they contributed to samizdat edited anthologies Le-La and catalogues (Open Game, Sphere of Dream, Transformations of Humour, Imaginative Spaces, Opposite of the Mirror).

[23] During the short period up to 1970 Švankmajer still managed to make the "Kafkaesque" allegorical short films The Garden, The Apartment and Silent Week in the House, the morbid Ossuary and the "puppet" film Don Šajn (1970), in which marionettes are replaced by live actors who have wires and guide strings attached to their papier-mâché heads, symbolizing the theme of human manipulation and the limitations of individual freedom.

[22] At the end of his persecution, he filmed two of Poe's short stories, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope, using themes from the work of Villiers de l'Isle Adam.

Švankmajer's daughter Veronika Hrubá collaborated as a costume designer on the films Lunacy (Czech Lion Award), Surviving Life, and Insects.

[67] He cites the French Poète maudit, German Romanticism (Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann), and the Surrealists (A. Breton, K. Teige, B. Péret, V. Effenberger) as major literary sources.

[3] Švankmajer makes films only when they are finished in his imagination, but during the shooting process he does not stick to the script, he looks for new sources of inspiration and tries to reach an acceptable compromise with the original intention.

Not only his films, but also his collages, prints, ceramics and three-dimensional objects are based on his infantile worldview, which took the form of a puppet stage with symmetrically cut sets and figures hanging on strings.

Surrealism and Mannerism, which are anchored in the duality of opposites - rationalism with the irrational, sensualism with spiritualism, tradition with innovation, convention with revolt - create the necessary tension for creative activity.

After Jan Švankmajer and his wife joined the Surrealist Group around Vratislav Effenberger, from 1971 to 1989 he contributed as author of texts and illustrations to anthologies and catalogues published by the group as samizdats (Otevřená hra / Open Game, Sféra snu / Sphere of Sleep, Proměny humoru / Transformations of Humour, Obrazotvorné prostory / Imaginative Spaces, Opak zrcadla / Opposite Mirror, Gambra / Gambra).

[126] In the early 1970s he began to create the Svank-meyers Bilderlexikon, as a kind of encyclopedia of the alternative world, including fictional fauna and flora, technical devices, architecture, ethnography and cartography.

The Bilderlexikon, which the author continued to develop in later years, includes the cycles Geography, Zoology, Technology (Masturbation Machine, 1972-1973), Architecture, Unconventional anatomy (1998), and Insects (Hexapoda) (2018).

In 1999, jointly with Eva Švankmajerová, he created a series of coloured lithographs with fantasy themes as part of a collective game invented by the Surrealists (Cadavre exquis, 1999).

The ceramic objects conceal cavities (Little and Big Demon, 1990) and invite exploration of the contents, but also touching, stroking or caressing, thus connecting key points of human sensuality.

Gestural sculpture is intended to evoke associations linked to the sense of touch, to expand the field of tactile perception and to explore previously uncharted areas.

His seemingly innocuous monsters, combining gesture-moulded clay with brushes, forks, sieves and other ordinary objects, exude an Ubu-esque preoccupation that mixes tragedy with humour, as well as a sarcastically mocking, almost animalistic cheekiness or contemptuous narcissism.

[140] In his film The Fall of the House of Usher, the gestural animation of clay, which here represents primordial matter (prima materia in the alchemical sense), is used to interpret the poem by E. A. Poe Švankmajer's need to reveal the primary sources of human imagination is also related to his tactile objects.

Erotic inspiration is present in Švankmajer's films as a manifest provocation and parody of utilitarian sex, sarcasm, black humour, interpretation of sexual deviance and existential anxiety.

According to Effenberger, Švankmajer's Natural History Cabinet, containing phantom creatures that seem to have escaped scientific registration only to be discovered by the imagination of a rebellious child determined to protect poetic freedom, is a work of philosophical attitude rather than mere artistic sarcasm.

His "fossilized objects" become covered with a layer of mineral spring deposition, which gives them a uniform reddish-brown surface - a colour characteristic of Švankmajer's other works and originating in childhood memories.

[148] Švankmajer's fetishism consists in linking an unfinished series of sources and contexts, which develop over time from the simpler to the more complex and, like a snowball, pile on top of each other the author's affects, emotions, knowledge and obsessions that give energy to the process.

He thus proceeds against the meaning of the puppet itself, and in his creative mania he moves on to ever more ambiguous objects, whose external form and semantic functions metamorphose, thus increasing their symbolic quality.

When everything began to deteriorate in the drawers in the sun and the fly larvae formed wounds in the matter, he completed the transformation with a heat gun, covered it with asphalt and buried it in ash.

[153] In the reliquaries, the seemingly sacred and the profane intertwine and are transformed into co-carriers of a sarcastic vision, becoming parts of The Emperor's New Clothes in a sell-out of today's world of contentless institutions and hackneyed political, economic, or value clichés in general.

[160] In his literary texts, he makes no secret of his sceptical view of the current form of human civilisation, which is destroying the spiritual essence of man with its pragmatism, utilitarianism and rationalism.

[161] Humanity, perhaps out of impatience, tries to introduce all noble and humanistic ideas first in a swift and bloody way, and only after the failure of this brutal variant does it embark on the lengthy path of peaceful evolution.

[162] Švankmajer's apocalyptic visions foresee a post-civilizational disintegration of nation-states, coupled with the return of a new feudalism in the form of some kind of principalities, controlled by multinational concerns, where ordinary people will once again become serfs.