When I first arrived at art school, many years ago, I had little knowledge of the many movements that were to become the backbone of our art history classes. For reasons I cannot recall, the only one I thought I knew anything about was Surrealism, and the only painter whose work I was familiar with was Salvador Dali. I wasn't alone here. Discovering the wonders of Impressionism, Futurism, the Bauhaus and Dada et al proved an unexpected joy, but when the time finally arrived for us to study the Surrealist movement, the class let forth a murmur of excitement, which was countered somewhat by our lecturer's audibly weary sigh. This, it turned out, happened every year, and each time he would have to point out that there was a lot more to surrealism than Senior Dali (see the documentary Les Chimères de Svankmajer below for more on this) and that in his view Dali wasn't a proper surrealist anyway. We thus entered this particular phase of the course a little deflated, but two weeks later I was flying. By then I'd discovered the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Rene Magritte, the writings of Andre Breton and the genius of Luis Buñuel via Un Chien Andalou, his film collaboration with that improper surrealist Salvador Dali. That two weeks had helped bring into focus the hazy beauty of the subconscious and the dream world, or at least the artistic interpretation of it. It was here that my lifelong love affair with surrealist cinema began.

It took me a surprisingly long time to discover my first surrealist-influenced animated short, and in the subsequent years I came to appreciate just how perfectly suited this art movement and this particular medium were to each other. A painting or a sculpture may be able to capture the essence of a dream, but the moving image can, in the right hands, evoke the experience. I've watched a lot of animated shorts that have been at least partly shaped by the principals of surrealism, but few left me as gobsmacked as the first one I saw, a film that single-handedly ignited my collector's fascination with the genre. The film in question was Dimensions of Dialogue, the director Jan Svankmajer. If you've seen it then hopefully you'll know what I mean. If you haven't, then boy are you in for a treat. But there's more. Much more.

During the course of his career, the Prague-based Svankmajer has to date directed a total of twenty-six short films and five features and has steadily built a reputation as one of the world's most visionary and respected animators. Like those other modern masters of animated surrealism, the Quay Brothers, Svankmajer is a superb technician with a fondness for traditional stop motion techniques. Signature elements of his films include lightning fast montages, a distinctive use of clay animation and 'animated' live action, an inventive incorporation of found objects, and a fascination with structural decay and haunted memories of childhood. A distinctive element of Svankmajer's surrealism is its sometimes dark sense of humour, from the frustrations piled on the unfortunate occupant of The Flat and the silent cinema influence on the otherwise pessimistic A Quiet Week in the House, to the faux-documentary form of The Castle of Otranto and the bizarre violence dished out by the football players to each other in Virile Games. He comes close to all-out surrealist comedy in Darkness-Light-Darkness, in which a body in the process of gradual self-assembly experiments with a number of curious combinations before getting it right, the thunderous arrival at the door of excited genitalia throwing the rest of the parts into fearful pandemonium.

There's a paradox at the core of all surrealist art in which the deliberately random becomes the subject of analysis and debate, a search for hidden meaning in a piece that is supposed to have none. Buñuel and Dali's famous claim of Un Chien Andalou that "Nothing in this film symbolises anything" has failed to prevent almost 90 years of essays attempting to psychoanalyse its images and structure, but given that this is the imagery of dreams and that dreams themselves have long since been the subject of psychoanalytical interpretation, this is both understandable and valid. The same is inevitably true of Svankmajer's work, although he is more deliberately up front in some of his symbolism and subtext. There's a political undercurrent to many of the films that is specific to its time and place, his sly digs at his country's Communist years giving way to the all-out assault of the post-Velvet Revolution in The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. Ironically, when his work did fall foul of the Communist authorities it was often the result of their misreading of the film's artistic elements.

Equally and often more pronounced are the elements inspired by the director's personal concerns, fascinations and fears: the inability of individuals to effectively communicate that is central to Dimensions of Dialogue; the sense of false hope that dominates A Quiet Week in the House; the degeneration of sport into violence of Virile Games; the rampant consumerism of Food; the childhood terrors of Down to the Cellar. This last one in particular Svankmajer admits is strongly autobiographical – in one of the supporting documentaries in this DVD set, he recalls that the experience of being sent down to the cellar of his apartment block as a boy to collect coal or potatoes was so terrifying that he considered running away rather than having to repeat it.

Svankmajer's films exemplify why the animated short needs to be taken seriously as the premier modern art form, combining as it does the disciplines of painting, sculpture, collage, photography and experimental filmmaking to emotional as well as intellectual effect. As a collection, this BFI DVD set not only provides convincing evidence to support this proposal, but also usefully illustrates the extraordinary variety and scope of this unique filmmaker's oeuvre, making a mockery of the complaint by one IMDb contributor that Svankmajer has not progressed since 1971. This is, quite frankly, an astonishing body of work whose status can be measured by the fact that you end up judging the films not on how good or bad they are, but on their relative greatness in relation to each other.

The short films are collected on the first two discs of this set – the third disc is covered in the Extra Features section.

The Last Trick / Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara [1964] (11:19)
Svankmajer's first film as director, but you wouldn't know it from the confidence of the execution. Two doll-headed magicians take it in turns to perform tricks for the amusement of an unseen audience and the admiration of each other, the congratulatory handshake that concludes each demonstration becoming increasingly harder to break free from. Blending live action with stop motion, it's recognisably Svankmajer from the start and a pointer to things to come, from its production design and lightning fast montage editing to the degeneration into one-on-one conflict that ends in bodily dismemberment. Even the opening credits are playfully inventive in a way that has been borrowed from many times since.

J.S. Bach – Fantasy in G Minor / Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasia G-moll [1965] (9:26)
Music and imagery are stunningly entwined in this ravishing toccata of decay, as the Bach organ piece of the title is visualised through images of crumbling walls, decaying doors and shattered windows, beautifully photographed in scope framed monochrome and brought to life with rapid camera movements and animated transformation of their surface materials. A simple idea, immaculately realised – in the final rapid corridor tracks the camera seems to become the music.

A Game With Stones / Hra s kameny [1965] (8:36)
An honest title for a playful animated experiment with variously shaped and coloured stones, which are spewed from a clock once an hour and engage in a series of dances to the tinkling of the clock's own in-built music box. An enjoyable piece that feels more like an early film than the two that precede it, the sort of project budding animators test out their skills on. One sequence involving small stones used to make up human faces clearly anticipates the later Dimensions of Dialogue.

Punch and Judy / Rakvickarna [1966] (9:54)
One of the first Svankmajer films I saw (under its alternative title of The Coffin Factory) and one of his few early films to have even a semblance of a linear story. Punch and Judy expands on the grotesquery and violence of the character of Punch (I've never understood why kids aren't completely freaked out by this horrible creature) and his destructive conflict with his partner, something that Svankmajer seems to have enjoyed exploring.

Et Cetera [1966] (6:58)
In visually arresting shadow puppetry style, Svankmajer toys with notions of freedom, obedience and capitulation, the shifting and corrupting nature of power, and conflicting desires for security and independence, all particularly relevant to the time and place in which the film was made.

Historia Naturae, Suita [1967] (8:38)
A brilliantly edited celebration of the beauty and complexity of various animal species, which man, it is suggested, collects, imprisons, preserves and consumes. One of Svankmajer's most overt early political statements.

The Garden / Zahrada [1968] (16:09)
Svankmajer confirms his surrealist credentials with this live action story of reunited old friends, one of whom accompanies the other to his quiet house in the country to find it surrounded by a 'living fence', an unbroken ring of people with linked hands and stare-ahead faces. A genuinely dream-like concept with inescapable political overtones – many of those in the fence are dressed in the clothing of service occupations, workers in servitude to a landowner master, who cares nothing for their welfare and demands their unquestioning obedience. There is a dark inevitability to the ending, but that doesn't make it any the less chilling, and the visiting Frank's habit of nervously combing his hair is later used to subtly comment on the nature of authority within a system based on power and class.

The Flat / Byt [1968] (12:34)
A blackly comic surrealist nightmare that leads a young man into a room whose contents all disobey real world logic – water escapes from a gas stove, stones pour from a tap, a crooked picture cannot be adjusted without the one above it shifting, and a swinging light bulb punches a hole in the wall from which a wooden fist emerges to assault the curious. An attempt to eat is similarly frustrated by a soup spoon riddled with holes, a fork that bends out of shape, a beer glass that reduces to thimble size when raised to the lips, and an egg that falls through the table and is swallowed by a wall when thrown at it. A direct link with the surrealist movement is provided by a man who emerges from a wardrobe dressed in a Magritte-style bowler hat and a mirror that displays the back of the head rather than the face looking into it, recalling both Magritte's Not to be Reproduced (1937) and Dali's My Naked Wife Watching Her Body (1945).

Picnic with Weissmann / Picknick mit Weissmann [1968] (10:41)
In a woodland clearing, a man's possessions and furniture enjoy a quiet few hours without him. 78rpm records play, a chess board engages in a game with itself, three chairs and a dresser play football, a plate camera takes portraits, and a pair of pyjamas lounge on a bed and eat plums. Meanwhile, a shovel busies itself digging a large, rectangular hole. The surrealism of dislocating objects from their normal environment is explored to seemingly playful effect, but there's a dark twist to the tale that allows for a number of readings of what has gone before.

A Quiet Week in the House / Tichy tyden v dome [1969] (19:13)
A man on the run or a secret mission into enemy territory (it's never specified) enters an old house and sets up camp in a corridor. Every day he drills a new hole in the wall, through which he witnesses a series of strange visions, from a clockwork bird that escapes its tether to eat only to be subsequently buried and dismembered, to a hanging jacket that siphons water from a vase and then urinates on the floor, leaving thirsty plants to spontaneously combust. Images of destruction and false hope run throughout, the final act suggesting direct political allegory (and you can read plenty into the tongue that is minced into small rolls of printed typeface), and yet Svankmajer still manages a final moment of typically perverse surrealist humour. Stylistically, this is an unusual piece in Svankmajer's canon, the vérité-style camerawork, projector sound and exaggerated edit splices of the live action contrasting with an animation style that blends stop motion with optical dissolves.

Don Juan / Don Sanche [1969] (31:20)
A version of the Don Juan legend performed by oversized marionettes that is in some respects one of Svankmajer's most atypical early films, the surrealism confined to the the puppetry and Don Juan's creepy night time confrontation with the ghost of the murdered and faceless Don Avenis. It's still an intriguing piece for its blending of real locations with the artifice of a stage production (sometimes in the same shot), the combination of performance and altered frame rate to make actors move like marionettes, the use of decayed and crumbling architecture and the urgency of some of the camerawork.

The Ossuary / Kostnice [1970] (10:06)
A visually startling trip through the Sedlec Ossuary, an extraordinary Roman Catholic chapel decorated with the bones of over 40,000 human skeletons, largely victims of the Black Death in the 14th century. It's the sort of place that even a straight documentary would render bizarre, but Svankmajer's approach – all sudden camera movements and lightning edits – imbues it with a particularly nightmarish quality, images caught fleetingly that prove cumulatively overpowering. The original soundtrack consists of the voice of a female guide cheerlessly giving a group of schoolchildren a tour of the Ossuary and becoming increasingly impatient at their inability to obey the 'don't touch' rule, even imposing an on-the-spot fine on one unfortunate. It's a fascinating aspect of the film that both compliments and counterpoints the visuals, its continuous flow at deliberate odds with the fractured editing style, but fleetingly in sync with the speech, as when the guide complains of the graffiti that has been drawn on the bones is married to the image of a series of skulls bearing the signatures of past visitors. For reasons known best to the authorities of the time, this soundtrack was considered in some way subversive and a new track was commissioned, a strangely (and intermittently effectively) at-odds piece of lounge jazz, preceded by a short history of the Ossuary. Here the editing feels less jarring than on the original version, due in no small part to our own experience with the sometimes frantic visuals of music videos, where music provides a glue that natural sound cannot. Both versions are included here, and despite the intriguing strangeness of the music track, I'll go with the original every time.

Jabberwocky / Zvahlav aneb Saticky Slameného Huberta [1971] (13:20)
Taking inspiration from Lewis Carroll's famous nonsense poem rather than attempting to visualise it, this is an imaginative tour-de-force that goes some way to defining what could vaguely be described as the Svankmajer style, from its realistic figure animation to the use of varied materials and techniques. It's the sort of film that at first seems deliberately random in its imagery and yet invites detailed analysis of every scene, its play on childhood memories and abstract fears as pure an expression of animated surrealism as Svankmajer had delivered up to this point in his career.

Leonardo's Diary / Leonarduv denik [1972] (11:16)
Svankmajer switches materials again with this rare venture into traditional 2D drawn animation, but typically combines it with 3D stop motion to repeatedly crumple the paper on which the images appear. The drawings here are all based on Leonardo Da Vinci's own and are beautifully rendered and animated, the relationship between the animator and his inspiration established by a pencil that draws a hand that then takes over the process of creation. The intercutting of animated historical battles with footage of modern street riots gives the film a political undercurrent that once again landed Svankmajer in trouble with the powers that be, resulting in a seven year absence from the director's chair.

The Castle of Otranto / Otrantsky zámek [1979] (17:15)
The playful humour than runs through much of Svankmajer's work shifts up a step as reporter Milos Ryba interviews archaeologist Jaroslav Vosáb about his theories regarding Horace Walpole's 1764 gothic novel The Castle of Otranto. The live action mockumentary footage is intercut with sequences from the novel, brought to life through Terry Gilliam style cut-out animation of the book's illustrations, complete with captions and page reference numbers. Typically fast paced, it builds to a supernatural punchline which the final shot of Dr. Vosáb appears to amusingly deconstruct.

The Fall of the House of Usher / Zánik domu Usheru [1980] (15:02)
The first of Svankmajer's two Edgar Allen Poe adaptations hooks into the original story's sense of gloom and decay, the latter a favourite theme of the animator's and one that becomes the key focus of this richly atmospheric trip through the Usher house. Beautifully toned monochrome photography recalls the destructive imagery of Fantasy in G Minor and The Flat, while a combination of object manipulation and superb clay animation creepily evokes the atmosphere of the story without ever showing any of the human protagonists.

Dimensions of Dialogue / Moznosti dialogu [1982] (11:18)
One of the most perfectly realised of Svankmajer's short films, Dimensions of Dialogue is a brilliant riff on the consequences of humankind's inability to effectively communicate. The film is divided into three titled sections. The first, Factual Dialogue, is one of the director's most technically complex pieces, a twist on the Rock-Paper-Scissors game in which human heads constructed from different everyday materials (kitchen implements, fruit and vegetables, stationery items and tools – the practical, the organic and the artistic, all key elements of modern human existence) are swallowed by each other, chewed up and spat out to reform from the damaged material, which then moves on to inflict similar damage on another. In the second, Passionate Dialogue, perfectly sculpted clay figures of a man and a woman touch, kiss, embrace and dissolve into a rippling torrent of sexual pleasure. When they emerge they have created an offspring, an unformed clay blob that neither of them want and that becomes a weapon in their rapidly deteriorating and physically destructive relationship. In Exhausting Dialogue, the clay heads of two middle-aged men produce complimentary objects from their mouths, a sharpener for a pencil, paste for a toothbrush, laces for a shoe, butter for bread. Their mutually agreeable dialogue soon falters, however, as the same objects are mismatched and inflict damage on each other, leaving both heads crumpled and exhausted. This is surrealism with purpose, the message always clear but delivered with a skill and imagination that is genuinely touched by genius.

Down to the Cellar / Do pivnice [1983] (14:44)
A young girl is sent down to the cellar of her apartment block to collect potatoes from the crate in which they are stored. It's a journey filled with strange terrors, including a man who sleeps in a bed of coal and offers her rest for the night, a woman who makes cakes from coal dust, potatoes that leap from her basket and make their own way back to their crate, and a giant and fearsome-looking cat. The most clearly autobiographical of Svankmajer's films is also the one that that speaks most directly to the childhood fears of its audience, awakening memories of a time when surrealism was not just confined to the dream world, but part of imagination-fuelled everyday life.

The Pendulum, The Pit and Hope / Kyvadlo, jáma a nadeje [1983] (14:20)
Svankmajer's second Poe adaptation is a genuinely disturbing retelling of The Pit and the Pendulum, one that puts the audience inside the head of the tale's unfortunate protagonist to create a completely subjective experience. The atmosphere of twisted horror is heightened by Eva Svankmajerová's production design and Miloslav Spála's high contrast monochrome camerawork.

Virile Games / Muzné hry [1988] (14:01)
A man lines up the beers and the biscuits for the big football match on TV in which the players win points not for scoring goals but for fatally and spectacularly assaulting each other. Clearly a comment on violence in sport and spectator reaction to it (fans cheers wildly at the match while the viewer indifferently drinks another beer, even when the action spills over into his flat). There's nonetheless a wonderfully perverse humour to the on-pitch ballets, the extended half-time bathroom break and the grimly creative methods the players use to dispatch each other, a tit-for-tat battle that you can't help thinking had at least some influence of Bill Plympton's 1991 animation Push Comes to Shove.

Another Kind of Love [1988] (3:35)
Another rarity for Svankmajer, a music video for Stranglers' ex-front man Hugh Cornwell, one that's busy with imagery both familiar and new, and despite the song's upbeat melody there's a pleasingly dark sense of a man trapped in a room of his own memories and fantasies, physical contact with which results in him being pulled into the wall and out of physical existence. All that's missing here is an explanation of how the hell Hugh Cornwell, of all people, was able to persuade one of the world's greatest animators to illustrate his song.

Meat Love [1988] (1:07)
A visual gag in which two steaks cut from a beef joint enjoy a brief flirt before their intimate roll in the flour lands them in the frying pan. A subtextual element is nonetheless evident, and the animation alone is a delight.

Darkness-Light-Darkness / Tma/Svetlo/Tma [1989] (7:13)
Various body parts arrive in a small room and innocently attempt to find a logic to their assembly, alternately curious and fearful at the arrival of more. Beautifully sculpted and animated, this is one of Svankmajer's most overtly playful and wittily comedic films, but it still ends on a note of claustrophobic, surrealist horror.

Flora [1989] (0:31)
A body made of vegetable material and tied to a bed is rapidly decaying, unable to reach the nearby glass of water that may just save its life. Just thirty seconds long but still visually startling and packed with subtext about the age, encroaching decrepitude, and our own role in the cycle of nature.

The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia / Konec stalinismu v Cechách [1990] (9.24)
Post-Velvet Revolution Svankmajer dumps the subtle approach for his most up-front political statement, a self-proclaimed "work of agitprop" that provides a fragmented political history of Communist Czechoslovakia. Subtle it ain't – workers moulded from clay on a production line are then executed and dumped for recycling; the flag of the Czech Republic is painted on every every surface in a run-down workshop; rolling pins crush everything in their path – but artistically thrilling it most definitely is. If you don't know your Czech political history then it should at least prompt a little post-film research.

Food / Jídlo [1992] (16:22)
Adopting the three-act structure of Dimensions of Dialogue, Food is a wonderfully designed and consistently witty exploration of human consumption, both literally in the items ingested and metaphorically in its digs at greed and social division in an increasingly disposable society. Breakfast is a nightmarish riff on both the fast food culture (the first McDonald's restaurant opened in Prague in March of 1992) and humankind's role in the food chain, with diners feeding before being transformed into dispensing machines for the next customer. Snobbery and the new social divisions get a dig in Lunch, as a sniffy businessman and an unkempt youth repeatedly fail to attract the attention of a resturant waiter and take to eating the plates, their clothes and even the furniture, but it isn't destined to stop there. In Dinner, a large gastronome spends forever adding condiments to a dish that has been very specially prepared just for him, a sly dig perhaps at self-destructive modern lifestyles and eating habits. Technically Food one of Svankmajer's most impressive achievements to date, the switch from live action to claymation so perfectly executed that the join is genuinely invisible. By the way, the bearded gentleman who sits down for breakfast at the end of the first sequence is the film's animator Bedrich Glaser.

Svankmajer's aspect ratio of choice has almost always been 1.33:1 and the majority of the films here have thus been so presented, the notable exception being J.S. Bach – Fantasy in G Minor, which was shot in scope and has been anamorphically enhanced for this release. All of the films are genuine PAL remasters, and despite the age of some and a few dust spots here and there, this is far and away the best you've ever seen any of them look, and I'm including Kino's US Svankmajer short film collections. Sharpness is generally excellent and colour and contrast are just right, the black levels always coal-cellar perfect. The tonal beauty of the greyscale images in the monochrome films is particularly well captured, the high contrast look of a couple of them clearly deliberate. Detail is just a tad softer on two or three of the films (Meat Love is probably the most noticeable), but the picture quality otherwise remains high.

The extra features are also nicely presented, although Johanes Doktor Faust is non-anamorphic scope and to keep the picture clear the subtitles are in the border area. This should cause no problems on LCD and plasma TVs, but depending on the overscan of your CRT widescreen you may lose a little information when there are two lines of text, unless you have a subtitle zoom mode. Otherwise the picture quality is fine. The Lunacy trailer is anamorphically enhanced widescreen.

The soundtracks are largely Dolby 2.0 mono and always clear – a little fluff and crackle is audible on Down to the Cellar, there's a bit of a hum on Johanes Doktor Faust, and there are a couple of pops on the soundtrack of The Castle of Otranto. Food has a very nice stereo track, and both the Chez TV interview and the Lunacy trailer are also in stereo.

Johanes Doktor Faust [1958] (17:23)
Directed by Emil Radok, this is the first film that has Svankmajer's name in its credits and one he remains proud of. A retelling of the Faust story with puppets "made by an old family of puppeteers," it foreshadows Svankmajer's own work with its smart use of camera angles and movements, its effective mixing of animation styles, its sometimes unsettling dreamlike imagery and its excellent montage work. Svankmajer, of course, was later to make his own version of Faust in 1994.

Nick Carter in Prague / Adéla jeste nevecerela [1977] (5:00)
Three extracts from a longer work made during the post-Leonardo's Diary period when Svankmajer abandoned directing and worked instead on other people's films, here creating a giant carnivorous plant that would not be out of place in The Little Shop of Horrors.

The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer [1984] (53:36)
A documentary directed for Channel 4 on Svankmajer by the Quay Brothers' regular producer Keith Griffiths, with animated inserts from the Quays that were compiled into a short film for inclusion on the BFI's Quay Brothers Short Films DVD. Here those same sequences are beguilingly used in place of interviews that Svankmajer was apparently unwilling to give, cut with extracts from his films (almost all of Dimensions of Dialogue is included) and interviews with a number of art historians, surrealists and critics. Animated links and revealing quotes from Svankmajer aside, this is a slightly academic affair, thanks in part the middle-class dryness of the interviewees – they know their stuff, but I wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with any of them.

Les Chimères de Svankmajer [2001] (58:18)
Shot during the making of the feature film Little Otik and the creation of the 1998 touring exhibition Anima Animus Animation, this is an enthralling and revealing peek at the creative partnership between Svankmajer and his wife Eva Svankmajerová. Both appear comfortable with the camera's presence and talk freely about their past and present work, and there are some priceless comments here, from Jan's determination to convince young people that there's more to surrealism than the paintings of Salvador Dali (ah yes, well...) and his recollection of his childhood terror of cellars, to Eva's observation that ten years after the fall of communism they are all now encouraged to be only interested in money, which is just as bad. The behind-the-scenes material on Little Otik is particularly welcome. Terrific.

Czech TV Interview (2001) (8:58)
A brief interview conducted with Svankmajer as part of a Czech TV series The History of Painting and Sculpture that includes some of his artwork and a useful overview of Eva Svankmajerová's paintings. I was particularly caught by Svankmajer's assertion that the common denominator to what he does in his work is "the game."

'Lunacy' Trailer [2005] (3:04)
A trailer that leaves you wondering just what the film as a whole must play like, but that intrigues nonetheless.

Booklet
The final extra is not on any of the discs, but takes the form of a handsomely produced booklet containing a number of quality stills and an informative essay on every film and extra in the set.

What can I say? A genuinely remarkable body of work, all splendidly remastered and collected together in a wonderfully comprehensive 3-disc set. Even if you have a substantial number of these films on other formats or even DVD, this is a must-have, and if you are seriously interested in either animation or surrealism or both, then consider this an essential purchase. Absolutely bloody marvellous.