Kunstkamera

To the sounds of Vivaldi's Spring, viewers are given access to the director's home and workplace in South Bohemia. In long sequence shots, the winding rooms of the building reveal themselves and a whole universe of fascinating, bizarre, or beautiful found items and collector objects as well as artworks. It is virtually impossible to even begin to comprehend the wealth of objects of art and cultural history accumulated here.  Elegant porcelain figurines stand next to ethnological artifacts, and in between them are dolls and puppets of all kinds—on strings and sticks, made of fabric, wood and metal, with hidden clockworks and chimes, Indonesian shadow puppets, Bohemian marionettes, Punch, devils, angels. But the rooms, stairwells, and suites offer much more. Large-format paintings hang on the walls, prints and drawings spill out of drawers. This film gives us the extraordinary privilege of sharing in Švankmajer's artistic legacy. For him, collecting is part of the creative process. In an interview, he once confessed: “I collect relics of the magical world that once prevailed and corresponded far more to human mentality than the current state of affairs.” Thus, this work brings several circles full circle. The displayed objects refer, for their part, to Švankmajer's classic short films, such as PICKNICK MIT WEISMANN (Austria 1968) and KOSTNICE (Ossuary, ČSSR 1970), which bring seemingly lifeless objects to life in an eerie way. And the director also points to the inspiration of spaces, in which we are only temporary guests that – as in BYT (The Flat, ČSSR 1968) – is a central topos of his work.