Jan Svankmajer: Puppets and politics

For today's film-makers, getting your work shown at the Cannes film festival is a dream come true. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of early 1970s communist Czechoslovakia, it was an opportunity that turned into a nightmare, as the surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer tells me over biscuits and peanuts in the cabinet of curiosities he calls home.

I half expect the snacks to come to life – to arrange themselves into little biscuit and peanut men, and start fighting on the table top. For several weeks, I have immersed myself in Svankmajer's films, in which everyday objects take on lives of their own. In his latest film, Surviving Life, the actors are turned into puppets through animation of still photographs.

Svankmajer's short film Leonardo's Diary – animated versions of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings spliced with stock footage of modern warfare – was shown at Cannes in 1974. It was noticed by a Czech film critic, who denounced it in the communist press as a strange piece of fantasy without socialist content.     Read Here