Watching Jan Švankmajer’s documentary on his private art collection is like walking through his head. And that’s hardly an exaggeration. We are seeing the collection of a lifetime.
Every painting, drawing, statue and other object we see, gathered in Švankmajer’s gorgeous residence in the tiny Czech town of Horní Staňkov, has been hand-picked over decades by the great Czech filmmaker and animator (together with his wife and colleague, the late Eva Švankmajerová).
Švankmajer is famous for creating unique film worlds in his very own, unmistakable style, inspiring filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and the Quay Brothers. The source material for that world and that style is on full display in Kunstkamera. Some key words to note: ‘art brut’, ‘alchemy’, ‘art by indigenous peoples’, and specific types of ‘modern art.’ Some of it what we see is directly connected to his films – I think I recognised the Victorian doll from Alice (1988), his greatest masterpiece, and the large marionette from 1996’s Conspirators of Pleasure.
Of those films, Švankmajer once said in an interview: “I have been making a single film for my whole life […]. It would certainly be worth trying to […] combine [my films] into one long whole-day film and to watch the continuity of plot, environment, characters, actors, props, music, and commotion. It might then be possible to show my life in a light more realistic than the one that I have actually lived.” That master edit of the entire Švankmajer Cinematic Universe does not yet exist, but I feel Kunstkamera is doing something similar.
That is because the collection is enormous and the documentary seems exhaustive. Although apparently, another twenty hours of material was shot that didn’t even make the cut – the director’s cut, to be precise, which is the version of Kunstkamera having its world premiere at the Ji.hlava festival. A shorter cut of 55 minutes, which I have not seen, was shown at the Summer Film School Uherské Hradiště in July 2022. But it’s Ji.hlava which has the honour of premiering what has been announced as the last feature film project of the Czech surrealist (born in 1934), who had already presented his last fiction feature, Insects, in 2018 (for which Gilliam and the Quay Brothers helped with crowdfunding, as a gallant gesture to their mentor).
A word of warning: there is no animation in Kunstkamera (except for some very minor effects). There is also no dialogue, no voice-over, and no explanatory text, either for the collection as a whole or for the individual objects. The objects and their arrangements speak for themselves. Aided by the visual style, from slow pans to fast-cut close-ups, Kunstkameratakes on a musical rhythm. It often cuts to the soundtrack of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. If that seems a rather conventional accompaniment for such an idiosyncratic collection, know that parts of the music are played backwards – still sounding remarkably solid.
And I am sure Švankmajer would not have done it – played the music backwards – if it didn’t still sound good. Because one of the defining characteristics of his collection is that every object is a thing of beauty. From Japanese pornography via Švankmajer’s own imaginative taxidermy to African and Asian masks, including many depictions of hell and deformed bodies, it is the beauty of these handpicked objects that dispels any suspicion of sensationalism.
Speaking of those masks, there is of course an uneasy history to the exhibition of so-called ‘primitive art’ in the Kunstkammer (or Wunderkammer, Kunstkabinett or ‘Cabinet of curiosities’) of Europe’s nobility, which was the direct inspiration for Jan Švankmajer’s own collection. In particular, he was inspired by the Kunstkammer of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612), whose portrait by Arcimboldo is seen at the beginning of the film.
Švankmajer’s collection does not include ‘shrunken heads’ (another staple of the Wunderkammer), as far as I could ascertain, but it is impossible to look at the African, Asian and possibly South American masks (they are unmarked and I am not an expert) without acknowledging the colonial repression, exploitation and mystification that are part of the history of presenting these as ‘curiosities’ in Western collections.
And there are moments where the film does feel kind of wrong. When it focuses on the oversized breasts and genitalia of non-Western statues, for example. Or when one such statue, which has nails driven into it as part of its design, is accompanied by the sound of rattling metal. That feels like mocking, whereas these masks and totems might be as important and meaningful to the culture th
ey were taken from as Jesus is to Christians. And the enlarged genitalia could be a common cultural expression in their country of origin (such as the Bisj poles from New Guinea in Švankmajer’s collection), their provocative effect accorded only after their transposition to the context of Western sexual repression.
Having said this (and I think it had to be said), I feel that this criticism ultimately does not apply to Švankmajer’s Kunstkamera. For his is like an inverted Wunderkammer. It has none of the pretence of representing the outside world that its colonial precursors had. This Wunderkammer is not a presentation of worldwide discoveries by noblemen, created to impress their visitors with the latest facts – often as fake as the popular unicorn skull created with a narwhal’s tusk – about that mysterious heathen world their brave soldiers, merchants and priests were conquering.
On the contrary, Švankmajer’s Kunstkamera presents a completely subjective collection. An expression of his inner world. He actually lives in it: although we never see people in Kunstkamera, just the art, we do see an unmade bed, a half-finished beer, a burning fireplace and a bowl of dog food. This is not an institutional, official, public museum. This is a home.
In the film, we’re not going out into the world, we’re going inside Švankmajer’s head. And, as someone only a little over one generation younger than Švankmajer, and also born in Europe (albeit in the NATO part, not within the part overseen by the Warsaw Pact), I have to admit that I often share his surreal sense of wonder. I have a similar fascination with pornography and genitalia (which Švankmajer has collected from all continents, not just in colonial contexts) and with all art forms that break with the Western canon, that ignore the division between high and low art, and that undermine established Western hierarchies of not only art, but also meaning.
And not knowing exactly where something is coming from can sometimes help. To let go of historical, geographical and religious categories (which all have troublesome histories and hierarchies of their own), and just let the piece itself have its effect. Its shock to the system. In this case: my system. Which is a Western system, of course (maybe Kunstkamera can only have its full effect in a Western context, maybe even only in a Western 20th-century context), to which those colonial connotations and sexual repressions also belong.
In fact, they cannot be removed from it. Not from the political reality outside and not from inside the surrealist and magical universe of Jan Švankmajer.
Czech Republic, 2022, 113 minutes
Director Jan Švankmajer
Production Athanor
Producers Jaromír Kallista, Pavla Kallistová
Script Jan Švankmajer
Cinematography Jan Růžička, Adam Oĺha
Editing Jan Daňhel
Sound Ivo Špalj
Music Antonio Vivaldi
