Jan Svankmajer

This essay aims to trace subversive pleasures in Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (Něco z Alenky, 1988) and their revolutionary potential residing within densely saturated atmospheres of aesthetic expression. It will be explored, how poetic-analytical notions such as ‘adorned shadows’ and ‘subversive pleasures’ serve to describe expressive dramas and intensities and how their very material as well as abstract nature facilitates the possibility of social and political change. In order to elaborate this claim, the paper will draw extensively on Antonin Artaud’s ‘metaphysics of expression,’ Paul Ricœur’s notion of mimesis, Vivian Sobchack’s view on interobjectivity, and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the event. The approach is experimental. Poetic and analytical language inspire each other to unfold and indulge within, in between, on / of the powerlessness to think and the fragility of sense – an erotics of interpretation toward the expressible and expressed in Švankmajer’s remarkable interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

This essay aims to trace subversive pleasures in Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (Něco z Alenky, 1988) and their revolutionary potential residing within densely saturated atmospheres of aesthetic expression. It will be explored, how poetic-analytical notions such as ‘adorned shadows’ and ‘subversive pleasures’ serve to describe expressive dramas and intensities and how their very material as well as abstract nature facilitates the possibility of social and political change. In order to elaborate this claim, the paper will draw extensively on Antonin Artaud’s ‘metaphysics of expression,’ Paul Ricœur’s notion of mimesis, Vivian Sobchack’s view on interobjectivity, and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the event. The approach is experimental. Poetic and analytical language inspire each other to unfold and indulge within, in between, on / of the powerlessness to think and the fragility of sense – an erotics of interpretation toward the expressible and expressed in Švankmajer’s remarkable interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The defining feature of stop-motion animation is the use of real world objects that need to be moved frame by frame to create movement in the film. Within experimental filmmaking, the Quay brothers and Jan Svankmajer are influential figures who have influenced mainstream stop-motion filmmaking. In this paper, the influences of these two creative forces will be discussed in relation to the animated feature film Coraline (2009).

A pesquisa se propõe a analisar a técnica de animação pixillation como linguagem específica, traçando relações deste tipo de animação com estudos ligados à imagem e ao movimento. Para isto, proponho atribuir ligações do pixillation com os trickfilms do early cinema, no âmbito da perspectiva mágica dos truques da técnica; estabelecer paralelos entre a prática fotográfica e a prática cinematográfica, utilizando-me de ambas as linguagens para avaliar questões do pixillation sob aspectos que dialogam com o conceito de magia e sua relação com as imagens técnicas; e, com base nos trabalhos em pixillation de Norman McLaren e Jan Svankmajer, entender a técnica como proposta poética e estética de linguagem audiovisual. Assim, através dos aspectos técnicos do pixillation, destacarei as potencialidades mágicas desse tipo de animação.

This paper has been published in the journalof esoteric studies "Hermaion" (Poland), No. 3, March 2016. The study is an examination of Jan Svankmajer's film "Alice" in the context of post-war Czech and Slovak Surrealism. An account is given of the origins of Czech Surrealism in relation to French developments and in the political leftist context. Surrealism as a form of political resistance in the Communist era is examined. The interest in alchemy on the part of Svankmajer is related to his fixation on the trope of the mouth and a psycho-analytic analysis is provided of this, as also of his interest in Mannerist art-forms. His work is compared with that of Mira Haberernová.

The project of this dissertation is to investigate the way in which Czech animator Jan Švankmajer gives expression to the inner-life of 'objects' and 'things' in his film-work of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; although work from outside of this period will help contextualise the discussion. Through this enquiry we will establish the difference between what we might regard as an 'object' and what we might regard as a 'thing' within his work and question whether their animation expresses a response to the Czech political situation at the end of the Cold War. This practice of 'letting objects speak' will be understood within the terms of the surrealist movement (both in its French and its specifically Czech incarnations), universal animism, and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. My framework for this investigation will be 'thing theory', with particular consideration paid to the work of Bill Brown, due to the special attention afforded to objects within Švankmajer's films.

The work of the Czech surrealist artist, film-maker and collector, Jan Švankmajer, has been greatly influenced by the Imperial history of Prague as a locus of collecting, magic, and curiosity. This paper will discuss how Švankmajer has adapted the evocative model of Rudolf II’s Wunderkammer to his own creative ends, producing his own poetic, analogical, and dream-like objects as part of a surrealist game of creative interpretation. In Švankmajer's ‘cabinet’ the imagination is sovereign. Although the artist categorizes his objects according to classifications synonymous with the Baroque-era, they interconnect as materializations of his inner world: vital, animated, and actively affective agents of Švankmajer's creative microcosm. Throughout his career, Jan Švankmajer has explored the imaginative force of objects through a variety of media. This paper will address his work as a case study within the discourse on curiosity, looking at how he explores both the history of the phenomenon of curious objects as well as the place of curiosity within creative, critical, and self-reflective processes.

This essay will address some of the intersections between surrealism and the ecological view, looking at the latent Darwinian position of the surrealists' uncanny dissolution of the boundaries between the human and non-human natural realms; how the surrealists' critique of instrumental reason and insistence upon the significance of poetic, inter-connective, thinking finds accord with ecologists' research into the continuities between humans and nature at large; and how the general politicizing thrust of surrealism, particularly its critique of 'restricted', liberal economics, presented a resistance to the naturalizing of self-interest and the Hobbesian view of nature that continues to legitimize the anti-ecological global hegemony of the corporate-industrial bloc.

This book examines post-war surrealist cinema in relation to surrealism’s change in direction towards myth and magic following World War II. Intermedial and interdisciplinary, the book unites cinema studies with art history and the study of Western esotericism, closely engaging with a wide range of primary sources, including surrealist journals, art, exhibitions, and writings. Kristoffer Noheden looks to the Danish surrealist artist Wilhelm Freddie’s forays into the experimental short film, the French poet Benjamin Péret’s contribution to the documentary film L’Invention du monde, the Argentinean-born filmmaker Nelly Kaplan’s feature films, and the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s work in short and feature films. The book traces a continuous engagement with myth and magic throughout these films, uncovering a previously unknown strain of occult imagery in surrealist cinema. It broadens the scope of the study of not only surrealist cinema, but of surrealism across the art forms. Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth will appeal to film scholars, art historians, and those interested in the impact of occultism on modern culture, film, and the arts.

Yönetmenliğini Jan Švankmajer'in yaptığı "Hayatta Kalmak" (Surviving Life) adlı film üzerine 17-27 Mart 2011 tarihleri arasında Ankara'da düzenlenen 22. Ankara Uluslararası Film Festivali'nde Serpil Aygün Cengiz'in yaptığı (yeniden gözden geçirilmiş olarak) sunum metni. // Presentation text (revised) on the movie "Surviving Life" directed by Jan Švankmajer which was presented by Serpil Aygün Cengiz at the 22nd Ankara International Film Festival on March 17-27, 2011.

This article is a theoretical examination of tactility in the Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer's film Down to the Cellar (1983). Švankmajer's deployment of tactile images in a surrealist context shows the need for a discussion of the imagination's role in the embodied film experience. Departing from Laura Marks's The Skin of the Film, this article seeks to explore the surrealist embodied imagination through surrealist poetics of analogy, as defined by André Breton, and the link between these and Walter Benjamin's writings on mimesis. Finally, the film is viewed from the perspective of Gaston Bachelard's ideas of “the imagination of matter,” where matter is seen as a highly potent stimulant for the imagination. Bachelard's notion of the imagination's multisensory properties further lends credence to Švankmajer's aims to liberate the imagination of the spectator through images that invoke touch.

Jan Švankmajer es un surrealista de muchas artes. Su sensibilidad polifónica se decanta en el cine por la animación, que le permite involucrar en sus obras la plástica, el teatro, los títeres y la música. Considerado como único en su tipo dentro de la historia del cine de animación, en realidad se desarrolla como cineasta muy dentro de las preocupaciones de la Nueva Ola Checoslovaca para luego continuar su camino en solitario cuando los otros realizadores de este período perdieron su carrera ante la censura.

This article examines depictions of animals in films by the contemporary Czech surrealist artist Jan Švankmajer. Švankmajer works in extension of a rich surrealist tradition of questioning anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Through intermedial comparisons with his creation of imaginary animals in collage and assemblage, the article argues that Švankmajer’s animation of natural history specimens, pieces of animal flesh, and imaginary animal assemblages unsettle ingrained conceptions of taxonomy and animal agency. Creating new connections across the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms, Švankmajer’s films evoke Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology with its assertion that ecological interconnectedness is a decidedly weird phenomenon.

*Academic Book Review*

Jan Svankmajer – Dimension of Dialogue/ Between Film and Fine Art ed. Frantisek Dryje and Bertrand Schmitt. Revnice: Arbor Vitae, 2012. 508 pages. $49.95, paperback.

Excerpt:

The most interesting piece is perhaps a short essay entitled, On the Authenticity of Art, where Svankmajer suggests that authentic works of art are those that come closest to the work of nature and that each conscious intervention by humans threatens the authenticity of the work. Svankmajer claims that the most authentic works of art are automatic texts, such as cave drawings. This piece is revealing as Svankmajer comments that his intention as an artist is to ‘fossilize’ artefacts of civilization. In this respect there is a great tension between Svankmajer’s engineering artistic efforts as totally inauthentic with his production of artistic artefacts which have the quality of being authentic fossils of civilization.

Auteur music video director Floria Sigismondi has a reputation for creating beautifully macabre imagery that has been described as surreal and uncanny. Less obvious is the way in which she uses animation and gesture to estrange the movement of performing bodies. While pixilation and stop motion animation are used together to invert the agency of humans and objects, Sigismondi’s use of gesture extends this manipulation of agency beyond technical processes. This dialectic of cinematic agency is discussed through an examination of three music videos directed by Sigismondi: End of the World(2004) for The Cure, Montauk Fling (2013) for Lawrence Rothman and The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013) for David Bowie. Considering these videos in relation to puppet animation, live-action film and the cultural and historical migration of gesture, the author argues that Sigismondi puppetises humans and animates gesture as a means of transgression.

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in  Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal; 10(2), July 2015, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. Copyright Lisa Perrott
Pages 119-140. doi:10.1177/1746847715593697

150 years ago, people read for the first time Alice’s immortal line “And what is the use of a book, without pictures or conversation?”  How she would have loved the movies! 

On Saturday 23 May 2015 I gave a paper at the Wonderlands: Reading/Writing/Telling Fairy Tales and Fantasy symposium at University of Chichester, organised by the Sussex Centre of Folklore, Fairy Tale and Fantasy.

I'll be talking about how three filmmakers have translated Alice from page to screen: Disney (1951), Svankmajer (1988) and Burton (2010).



In 1903 filmmakers began making narrative films, and in that year, Carroll’s Alice made her first film appearance in Britain’s longest running film to date.  Over the next 110+ years Alice and her adventures would become a staple source for film and TV.  There have been over hundreds of film/TV versions of this classic.  It has been re-told by countless directors many with all-star casts. In 1933 you could have seen Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, in 1966 John Gielgud and in 1999 Gene Wilder.



Alice has been referenced in cult films and TV such as The Matrix, Lost, Star Trek and The Simpsons.  Screenwritiers find news ways of returning to this childhood-classic. Danny Dyer starred in a gangster fantasy version Malice in Wonderland (2009) and in the forthcoming horror film Red Kingdom Rising.





I will be exploring how three auteurs (Disney, Svankmajer and Burton) took the same scene (The Mad Tea Party) from the novel and translated it to film. Through this gaining an understanding of how the director's vision shaped the look and feel of a film.

I chose these three, as they are creative filmmakers who are drawn to the surreal - which can be seen across their body of work. Therefore, it is interesting to see how they adapted the surrealist sensibilities of the original, whilst echoing their individual relationship with the alchemy of cinema and the art of illusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
When Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer released his film adaptation of the Faust legend in 1994, it was the culmination of a longstanding fascination with the story. His first screen credit was as a puppeteer on Emil Radok's short film Johannes Doktor Faust (1958), made during his time working as a director and designer at the Czech State Puppet Theatre. He had also staged a masked theatre production of Faust in 1962 for the Semafor Theatre in Prague. In the early 1980s, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to restage it at Prague's Laterna Magika, following his state-imposed ban from filmmaking (1972-79), after which he was permitted to work only from officially approved literary sources. By the time he came to make his own feature film version, the long-gestated project had come to encapsulate many of his aesthetic attitudes, as well as his relationship to his home city of Prague. As Švankmajer explained to Peter Hames in 2006:

"When any civilisation feels its end is growing near, it returns to its beginnings and looks to see whether the myths on which it is founded can be interpreted in new ways, which would give them a new energy and ward off the impending catastrophe. The myth of Faust is one of the key myths of this civilisation, and its interpretations are numerous. My Faust is intended to be one of these interpretative returns. I believe that Faust is one of the basic morphological or archetypal situations in which both individuals and civilisations find themselves. Sooner or later, everyone is faced with the same dilemma—either to live their life in conformity with the misty promises of institutionalised 'happiness', or to rebel and take the path away from civilisation, whatever the results. The second path always ends in individual failure, while the first ends in the failure of humanity as a whole. Or is it the other way round? The ambivalence makes no difference when it comes to the tragedy of human fate." (quoted in Hames 122)

Correspondingly, his film, Lekce Faust (although it was released as simply Faust in most territories, this full Czech title translates literally as A Faust Lesson, implying a reflexive examination of the legend itself ) is both a combination of multiple tellings of the story and a highly personal response, lodged firmly in the material realities of contemporary Czech culture. It therefore represents not an authoritative transliteration of a singular Faustus-text into the medium of film, but an indirect thesis on the contingencies of authorship, the chaos of interpretation, and the impossibility of direct adaptation.

It is certainly true that the Faust story has proven to be endlessly malleable for adaptation, appropriation, and revision across all media. The durability of the Faustus story is matched only by the sheer variety of media containers into which it has been poured. Švankmajer's Faust intervenes in this cacophony of retellings by functioning as a stylistic and semic pile-up of references. We are instructed to read the film as an assemblage of visions from different registers and sources, as opposed to an assimilated, re-authored composite that might ordinarily characterize a straightforward film adaptation. As a result, the film is a true chimera, refusing to blend its many textual and historical tributaries into a single stream of influence or definitive interpretation. In order to map some possible routes through this labyrinthine film, this essay first explores the ways in which Švankmajer relates the Faust legend to Prague through references to the story's historical and textual relationship to the city, including forms of folk puppetry and marionette theatre. This leads, via the figure of the puppet, towards an analysis of Švankmajer's use of animation as a way of representing the contested Faustian body as a site of violent conflict and social subjection. [...]

The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation from the 1920s to the present, covering both 2D animation forms and CGI, with a focus upon the stop-motion films of Jirí Trnka, Hermína Týrlová, Jan Švankmajer and Jirí Barta.

Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects.

In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers.

Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.

What keeps the spirit of Alice alive after all these years? And what makes us so spontaneously turn into armchair travelers ready to unconditionally follow a little girl on her fantastic journeys down a rabbit hole into topsy-turvy worlds? Alice's unfailing ability to amaze is due to her characteristic ambiguity that entails a plethora of interpretive possibilities and hence a rewarding adaptability to multiple mixed media forms which stimulate senses beyond the verbal games establishing the trademark charm of the original children's classic. Popular postmodern post/millenial re-configurations of Victorian fantasy, in particular late 20 st century and especially early 21 st century adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice tales , reveal how intermedial transitions elicit different modes of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment which both shape and reflect contemporary fantasists' strategies of make-believing, and circumscribe a metafantasy commenting on limits and potentials of the fantasy genre as well as the dys/functioning of imagination. Adventures get curiouser and curiouser once Alice ventures into Transmedia Wonderland, transgressing the confines of the written text towards visual, acoustic, tactile, kinetic and digital new media regimes of representation. Contemporary adaptations dynamically interact with their Victorian source texts as well as one another to enhance the immersion into an elaborate fictional universe and maximalize audience engagement, while retelling a story that remains recognizably the same, yet turns radically different with each new retelling. The journey to Wonderland today signifies a metafantasmagoric, metamedial mission urging all to interactively explore the cultural critical and ethical stakes of our embodied imaginative experience of making sense of nonsense.

Alice in a Hug of Imagination. Some Notes to Interpret the Film by Jan Švankmajer Něco z Alenky in
Relation to its Literary Model by Lewis Carroll
This paper focuses on the relationship between the film by Jan Švankmajer Něco z Alenky (Alice, 1987) and its literary
model by Lewis Carroll (1865), both at the general level, with the relationship between the text and the (film) image.
Švankmajer’s movie is an interpretation (not adaptation) of primary text. Explored subjects such as the miraculous,
the principle of play, childhood and the dream sphere, which are characteristic of both authors, are examined by this
study in their broader context.

Reading involves materials; e.g. the plate of transcription, and the bookmark. Reading also involves muscular movement; e.g. touching the stone plate of transcriptions, shuffling pages, and pressing computer keys. In the braille system, a visually challenged person touches the text with fingers to read. But, reading can have materiality literally in the sense that reading has thingness, not because it stops working as a material, but because it starts working as such. The present 'posterticle' (poster-article) explores, experiences, and enumerates the tactility of reading literature, that is, the ‘consumptional materiality’ of literature - how contemporary (from surrealist to postmodern) literary texts engage readers in the acts of experiencing, instead of simply decoding, through tactuality. The paper contends that tactile reading re-forms our perceptions and praxis of reading as well as frees touch from mere utilitarianism and activates a new, raw connection with the world of senses.
DESIGN AUTHOR: Zaki Rezwan Rahin

In the present thesis, a film by Jan Švankmajer, Faust (1994), is analysed. In the first part, an attempt was made to approach the subject through the context of film, Emil Radok´s puppet film adaptation of the same theme and from the same source as Švankmajer´s film, by using the tradition of Czech folk puppet theatre (and its adaptation of the Faust story). The contextualization of the film also pointed out some features of the Czech avant-garde of interwar period and the first film adaptations of Faust made by George Méliès. In the third part of the thesis, the extra-elaborated structure of the film is analysed by using Gérard Gennette´s narratological term, metalepsis. Also his distinctions of diegetical lines give us a clue for revealing the basic storylines of the film´s narration. The exquisite structure of the film contains visual paradoxes, and through mixing diegetical lines of narration by metalepsis, the main feature of the narrative becomes constant liminality.

Książka Bogusława Zmudzińskiego "Twórczość filmowa Jana Švankmajera. Główne konteksty kulturowe i ideowe" (2020) jest próbą odpowiedzi na pytanie o zasadnicze konteksty dla analizy krótkometrażowej twórczości Alchemika z Pragi. Autor przekonuje, że Jan Švankmajer jest kontynuatorem i polemistą wobec dzieła i twórczości malarza manierycznego Giuseppe Arcimboldiego. W zebranych esejach Zmudziński analizuje wybrane aspekty twórczości Švankmajera, lokując je w kontekście dzieła Arcimboldiego. Na uwagę zasługują w szczególności poruszone przez autora publikacji zagadnienia festiwalowej recepcji twórczości Švankmajera oraz postulat uwzględnienia lokalnych kontekstów powstawania filmów w procesie finalnej interpretacji dzieła.

An exploration of Czech Surrealist Jan Svankmajer's cinema, a cinema that spawns new and weird life forms--hybrids of machine, animal, and non-organic materials like stone and dust--existing in a space governed by a single uncanny order of being, a space wherein all things are at once animated and alert. This "animist cinema"--and by extension Surrealism itself--is considered as, at heart, an ethical, biopolitical, and ecological project militating against anthropocentrism.

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass And What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll’s most famous books, have been widely intersemiotically transposed throughout the last 150 years.  A number of illustration, plays, ballets, songs, movies, TV shows and others was made by renowned and lesser known artists.
Two notable examples seem to have escaped more usual analysis: a famous TV series by Jim Henson, The Muppet Show, aired from 1976 to 1981, featuring puppets and a human guest, in which an episode from the fifth season starred Brooke Shields playing Alice in 1980; and 1988 film with a blend of stop motion animation by multiple prize winner Czech director Jan Švankmajer, called Neco z Alenky.
We intend to compare these transpositions of Alice’s stories, in which translators choose seemingly distinct characteristics of the books, but  both of fundamental importance to the source: (i) The oneiric ambience in which the story is set and the permissiveness that it creates, allowing nonsense, amorality and lack of objective, and (ii) Various linguistic games used in a humorous environment.

中欧、東欧、中東欧…。ドイツとロシアのはざまには、その地域に住む人々が自分たち自身の名称としても、「この地域」を一言で到底言い表せないほど多様で複雑な世界が広がっている。「中欧」という呼び名を持つ、多様で多彩な文化、古代から中世・近世にかけてヨーロッパの諸帝国と結びついた、深い思想や宗教的特徴を持つ、華やかな地域。あるいは「東欧」としての、近代から現代にかけて周辺諸大国の被支配地域・被支配民族として存在し、だからこそ、自由と解放、変革と自立、独自の道を求めて、繰り返し、果敢に立ち上がり、歴史に残る諸事件を刻んできた、独立心旺盛で、勇猛果敢な地域・民族・人々。本書では23章・340項目をかけて、この多彩で豊かな地域の全貌を紹介する。テーマごとの中項目でどこからでも読みやすい事典。

著者名: 中欧・東欧文化事典編集委員会 編
編集代表：羽場久美子
発行元：丸善出版
発行年月日：2021年08月
判型：A5　210×148
ページ数：866ページ
ISBN：978-4-621-30616-1
Cコード：0522
NDCコード：234

中欧、東欧、中東欧…。ドイツとロシアのはざまには、その地域に住む人々が自分たち自身の名称としても、「この地域」を一言で到底言い表せないほど多様で複雑な世界が広がっている。「中欧」という呼び名を持つ、多様で多彩な文化、古代から中世・近世にかけてヨーロッパの諸帝国と結びついた、深い思想や宗教的特徴を持つ、華やかな地域。あるいは「東欧」としての、近代から現代にかけて周辺諸大国の被支配地域・被支配民族として存在し、だからこそ、自由と解放、変革と自立、独自の道を求めて、繰り返し、果敢に立ち上がり、歴史に残る諸事件を刻んできた、独立心旺盛で、勇猛果敢な地域・民族・人々。本書では23章・340項目をかけて、この多彩で豊かな地域の全貌を紹介する。テーマごとの中項目でどこからでも読みやすい事典。

著者名 中欧・東欧文化事典編集委員会　編
　　　　羽場久美子　編集代表
発行元：丸善出版
発行年月日：2021年08月
判型：A5　210×148
ページ数：866ページ
ISBN：978-4-621-30616-1
Cコード：0522
NDCコード：234

This essay explores the meanings and identities of toys and puppets in three Czech feature films, which collectively cover a range of animation techniques (constituting a new definition of what it means to 'play' with these toys). Jiří Bárta's Na půdě aneb Kdo má dneska narozeniny (In the Attic: Who Has a Birthday Today?, 2009), Jan Svěrák's Kuky se vrací (Kooky, 2010), and Jan Švankmajer's Něco z Alenky (Alice, 1988) all build allegorical significance from tales in which toys take on independent lives, but are always framed through their relationships to children. Each film explores the afterlife of discarded or neglected toys, dolls, and puppets, a visual representation of the imaginative investment and cultural import given to these otherwise immobile things. All three directors use toys and puppets as markers of the passing of childhood, and as compendia of cultural memory, but with different degrees of political intent and social critique.