Between slapstick and despair: Jan Švankmajer’s Faust

Faust is Jan Švankmajer’s first feature-length film and his most ambitious work since his adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in 1988. Its action moves between puppets, animated models and ‘real’ actors to create a brilliant mix out of the traditional marionette theatre of Eastern Europe and life in post-communist Prague. Rather than making of Faust a Romantic, Goethian hero, Švankmajer seems to suggest that the Faustian universe exists for all of us within the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Since his first film The Last Trick (1964), which celebrates the puppet theatre in which he was trained, Švankmajer has pursued many styles – live action, clay-modelling, puppets, object animation, drawing animation, stop-frame special effects and object collages. All of these techniques find their place in Faust.

His work also shows the influence of two major art trends – Surrealism, which has survived in Czechoslovakia since the early 30s, and the overwrought and technically exuberant Mannerism which found one of its greatest expressions in the bizarre paintings of Arcimboldi, who was resident at the court of the eccentric Hapsburg emperor Rudolf II in Prague in the late sixteenth century.

Like Švankmajer’s earlier films Don Juan and Punch and Judy, Faust explores the puppet tradition with a Surrealist sense of the burlesque, the droll and the uncanny. It also reflects Švankmajer’s fascination with the alchemical magic of Renaissance Europe. And finally Faust is a homage to Prague itself – the Surrealists’ ‘magical city’ – but here the director’s camera avoids the magnificent baroque buildings and focuses instead on the dilapidated courtyards, winding staircases, seedy hallways and bustling streets: the urban geography of the flaneur.

On a recent visit to England to help promote Faust at the Cambridge Film Festival, Švankmajer and his wife Eva stayed at Trinity College. It was as if a magic circle had been completed, made up of elements that include English Renaissance scholar Dr John Dee, sixteenth-century Prague, the Renaissance cabbala, alchemy, marionette theatre and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

It was in the hall of Trinity College in 1547 that Dr John Dee, who served as a model for Marlowe’s Faust, invented a theatrical machine for his production of Aristophanes’ Pax that propelled a man into the top of the theatre, causing rumours that its inventor was a sinister magician. Dee’s machine has been seen as one of the establishing moments of the great English sixteenth-century theatre.

Some years later, in 1580, Christopher Marlowe went up to Cambridge University. Marlowe, a spy in the Walsingham network of the Elizabethan period, was also a friend of minor poet Matthew Roydon, who visited Dee’s scryer, Edward Kelley, in Rudolf II’s court in Prague in 1591. Prague at the time hosted a clique of Catholic English exiles and was the centre of plots against the English throne. What Marlowe knew of ‘coining’ was probably learned from Roydon, who in turn learned it from Kelley. Thus when Švankmajer adapts Faust, a whole circle of alchemists, dramatists and magicians are connected.

Marlowe’s play survived largely through the popular theatre, by way of English travelling players who imported it to Germany, where it became part of the popular repertoire (its first recorded performance there was in Graz in 1608). It was also disseminated through the marionette theatre, probably receiving its first performance as a puppet play in Luneburg in 1666.

Švankmajer’s film has retained many of the pantomime aspects of early German popular drama as well as drawing on the marionette tradition that inspired Goethe, whose source for his own version was his childhood memory of performances by travelling puppet players.

The Marlowe play was not revived in Britain until the late nineteenth century but since then has served as the basis for over 40 films. Thus Švankmajer’s new work is part of a twentieth-century obsession with the Faustian theme, which has now taken on the notion that the price to be paid for overreaching desires and ambitions involves what Freud identified as the three subjects of daydreams: power, sex and fame.

Goethe’s interpretation of the Faustian hero is a Romantic one, emphasising the individual torment of the man and turning him into a tragic figure. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, while sympathetic to the ambitious intellectual at its centre, had a strong pantomime aspect and the exuberant special effects typical of pre-Shakespearian theatre. Švankmajer’s version is quite different, providing a series of Fausts who imply that within the contemporary world, all of us are capable of being manipulated by the demons of chance and petty ambition.

Mephistopheles and Helen – in many ways the tragic figures of Švankmajer’s version of the tale – are presented as life-size marionettes. Faust himself lacks any sense of overweening ambition and seems driven as much by curiosity as by anything more malign.

From Marlowe’s brilliant scholar and Goethe’s tortured being, we arrive at Švankmajer’s shabby bureaucrat, a quietly desperate, Kafkaesque figure willing to take his pleasures where he finds them and located firmly in modern-day Prague. Švankmajer’s Faust is a flaneur whose wanderings lead him by way of a strange map to a place where he can extend his life, albeit in a tawdry setting where the theatre enacts its perpetual charms.

In many ways this is also a film about the artist and the strange netherworld of the theatre wings, from which in a short step on to the stage all is transformed, sometimes irrevocably. Goethe’s version of the play begins with a discussion between a theatre director, a poet and a comedian, indicating perhaps that this aspect of Švankmajer’s vision has its roots in Goethe.

Figures such as Dee and the cabbalists may well attract those who have been marginalised, whose values are actively suppressed. A Surrealist artist in Stalinist Czechoslovakia, Švankmajer may have identified with this secret society with its own hermetic codes, symbols, rituals and beliefs. In their time, Dee, Faust, alchemists, Mannerists and Surrealists were all subversive elements who championed ideas – philosophical, social, political and aesthetic – which considered community alongside scientific endeavour, and freedom, intellectual and otherwise, as crucial to any social ordering.

Švankmajer’s film of Faust perhaps expresses his identification with those earlier times which seem to serve more and more as a model for our own. His next planned film is a version of Bluebeard, another myth with deep resonance in European culture. We must wait to see how he again connects the fears, desires and aspirations such myths seek to articulate with our present-day reality.