In Insect, a film that combines real images with some animation, Švankmajer is recovering a long-cherished project, the Čapek brothers’ misanthropic play Pictures from the Insects’ Life, bringing it to the screen with an amateur theatre company. He already heralds its creative process in the prologue, as if it’s based on a surrealistic game: «I wrote the script just as it came out, in one hit, like automatic writing and with no control or logic». Maybe it’s this method that contributes to the unique coherence in his work, the rare revolutionary aspect of it which he understands to be a necessary resistance: «The only response to cruelty in life lies in contempt for the imagination».
Hmyz (Insect), Jan Švankmajer, 2018, 98 min
O.V - Subt. Spanish
Screening in in DCP.
