SILENI / DER WAHNSINN
DIRECTOR: JAN SVANKMAJER
CZECH REPUBLIC, SLOVAKIA 2005
118 MIN / 35MM, FARBE, OV w. engl. ST

Caligari: 10.04. / 8.00 pm

DIRECTOR:
Jan Svankmajer

SCREENPLAY:
Jan Svankmajer
based on motives by Edgar Allan Poe and Marquis de Sade

CAMERA:
Juraj Galvanek

ART DIRECTOR:
Eva Svankmajerova
Jan Svankmajer

ANIMATION:
Martin Kublak
Bedrich Glaser

EDITOR:
Marie Zemanova

MUSIC:
Ivo Spalj

PRODUCER:
Jaromir Kallista

CAST:
Jan Triska
Pavel Liska
Anna Geislerova
Martin Huba
Jaroslav Dusek

PRODUCTION:
Athanor Film Production Company, Prag

CO-PRODUCTION:
Barrandov Studio, Prag

C-GA Film, Bratislava

Ceska Televize, Prag

in Zusammenarbeit mit Eurimages

VERTRIEB / DISTRIBUTION:
Athanor Film Production Company, Prag
Tel.: 00420 - 2 / 243 133 83
Fax: 00420 - 2 / 243 133 83
e-mail: athanor@nextra.cz

The legendary master of Czech surrealism unexpectedly opens his film with a personal appearance in which he tells the audience what to expect in the next two hours: a “philosophical horror film” based on motifs from Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade. Svankmajer, who is famous for his animated films, breaks up the action of his live characters with animated sequences of frantically jerking pieces of bloody, raw meat. Alongside these drastic images of the way of all flesh, which are frightening indeed – for vegetarians if for nobody else – unfolds the tale of Jean Berlot, a young man afflicted by nightmares in which two lunatic-asylum wardens are trying to force him into a strait-jacket. He accepts an offer of therapy from an evidently 18th-century gentleman named Marquis, but soon loses confidence in the healing powers of a man who holds black masses in his castle, hammers nails into a figure of Christ, and delivers blasphemous tirades against God and everything under the sun. Berlot’s attempts to flee eventually do take him inside a hospital. He pretends to be one of the patients, since they are at liberty to move about as they please, whereas the head doctors – reduced to tarred-and-feathered monster-like figures – are languishing in a cellar, watched over by the Marquis and his assistant. Berlot manages to free the hospital director, but this good deed ultimately turns against him. Svankmajer, who suffered under more than one regime in the course of his life, depicts rulers – whatever their political colours – as cynics, and hints that life itself is a horror from which there is no escape.

JAN SVANKMAJER
Born on 4.9.1934 in Prague, Czech Republic.
After his studies in stage design at the College of Applied Arts and at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU) in the Departement of Puppetry, Jan Svankmajer worked for the Theatre of Masks and the Laterna Magica Theatre. He began making animations in 1964 at the Kratký film studio in Prague. The creative output of the Czech surrealist always exceeded the limits of film and includes visual arts and literature. In 2002, goEast presented a selection of his animation films.

FILMOGRAPHY (ONLY FEATURE FILMS):
1987 Neco z Alenky / Alice
1994 Lekce Faust / Faust
1996 Spiklenci slasti / Les Conspirateurs du Plaisir / Conspirators of Pleasure
2000 Otesanek / Greedy Guts
2005 Sileni / Der Wahnsinn / Lunacy