An Evening with Eva Svankmajerova

Stunned by freedom/ you find out that:/ a line can grab hold of you/ like the flight/ like fire/ Colour takes your reason/ like blood/ and despair/ clay shuts you up in jail/ in the cemetery… dirties you/ until you are finally saved, Eva Švankmajerová wrote in the poem Stunned by freedom. A line that overpowers, a colour that blinds, a material that sullies – these ideas feel incredibly apt as a description of her design work on Jan Švankmajer’s films, which was borne out of a shared aesthetic and philosophical language.

Beyond their joint vocabulary of the surreal and the grotesque, Švankmajerová brought a distinct preoccupation with the familial, the psychic, and the feminine. Her generation grew up within a particular brand of socialism that claimed to have already achieved gender equality – at least legally and ideologically. As Julia Ioffe notes in her account of Soviet and post-Soviet womanhood, this model imagined equality without feminism: women already liberated as comrades in a collective struggle, not as a constituency with separate needs and demands. Where socialist ideology promised gender equality without conflict, Švankmajerová’s work quietly exposed the cost of that illusion.

The Last Trick (1964), Jan Švankmajer’s first film and the first to bear Eva Švankmajerová’s imprint, tells a story of two rival magicians who attempt to out-perform each other. Its humour, masks and handmade textures point toward the collaborative vocabulary the couple would develop – a surrealism rooted in craft, material labour, and the uncanny.

Based on Edgar Allan Poe, The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope (1983) is a work born under pressure: following a seven-year ban imposed by state censorship after the Prague Spring, Jan Švankmajer was allowed to return to filmmaking only on the condition that he limit himself to adaptations of recognised literary works. This constraint became a creative crucible, and in Švankmajerová’s hands it shaped a deeply subversive mise-en-scène. The set she designed recasts confinement, torture, and psychological dread as material, palpable forms. Under censorship’s watchful eye, her design insists that bodies, and by extension, minds, can be tortured and remade.

Adapted from the Czech folktale Otesánek, Little Otik (2000) tells the story of a childfree couple who adopt a tree stump as their baby, only to discover its monstrous hunger. Švankmajerová served as art director and designer, and her influence saturates the film: in the textures of Otik’s body, the oscillation between innocence and the grotesque, and the way domestic space warps into a stage of both nurture and omnivorous dread. Within the film, the wooden child whose appetite is never satiated becomes an allegory not only of post-communist greed, as critics have often noted, but also of the way societal expectations of motherhood devour the woman beneath. The film dismantles the myth of a harmonious nuclear family by revealing the tensions under its surfaces: motherhood as labour, parenthood as ambivalence, the home as both shelter and a trap. Through this lens, Little Otik becomes a fable about the violent undertow of domestic fantasy.

Across The Last Trick, The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope, and Little Otik, Švankmajerová’s designs turn materials into arguments, exposing the fault lines of power and the radical freedoms that persist beneath its surface. In an era that proclaimed equality while policing expression, she forged a visual language of subversion – with folklore as counter-history, horror as critique, and the family unit as a microcosm of ideology’s fractures.

[Aleksandra Jeglińska]