The Animaphix festival opens its 10th edition with Svankmajer Day:

A Tribute to Film Noir Surrealism.

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Animaphix “Nuovi Linguaggi Contemporanei Film Festival” – scheduled in Bagheria (Pa) from 23 to 28 July 2024 – warms up its engines in view of its 10th edition by presenting on Tuesday 30 April (11am – 1pm; 3pm – 5pm), at the White Hall of the Experimental Center of Cinematography (Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa) in Palermo the Švankmajer Day event, a study day dedicated to the master of cinematic noir surrealism, who in more than fifty years of visual experimentation has created a corpus of works that represent one of the most original experiences of European cinema.
The initiative – aimed at students of the Academy of Fine Arts and the CSC of Palermo, and open free of charge to free users, while places last – was born from the collaboration with the Czech Center and the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Rome, on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Jan Švankmajer (Prague, 1934).
Švankmajer Day will be divided into two distinct moments during which the screening of the most significant films by the Czech director will be accompanied by two masterclasses: Sound and Hypersensoriality in the films of Jan Švankmajer curated by Andrea Martignoni (sound designer, historian of animation cinema and director artistic by Animaphix) and Dystopian Noir between Animation and Surrealism curated by Luca Pulvirenti (professor of Digital Applications for the Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo).
Among the works that inspired, among others, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and the Quay brothers, the short films will be presented: Možnosti dialogu/Possibility of dialogue (Czechoslovakia, 1982), one of the masterpieces of avant-garde animation, capable of combining experimentalism of his grotesque and surreal style with an interesting anthropological and philosophical reflection on the impossibility of human beings to communicate, in the constant attempt to annihilate each other; Byt/The accommodation (Czechoslovakia, 1968) which narrates the life of a man trapped in an old apartment where the objects present rebel against him, forced to live in a space without logic, similar to a labyrinth; Jídlo/Cibo (Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, 1992) which addresses the theme of interpersonal relationships through the act of eating, as a ritual and instrument of oppression. In this short film everything revolves around food as a paradoxical and cynical metaphor for all of humanity. Furthermore, at 3 pm, the feature film Něco z Alenky/Alice (Switzerland, Germany, England, 1986), considered the masterpiece of surrealist noir cinema, as well as one of the most significant mixed media films of all time, where the novel by Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland, immediately becomes Švankmajer’s subversive universe.

ANIMAPHIX – Nuovi Linguaggi Contemporanei Film Festival
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