A human body gradually reconstructs itself as its various component parts crowd themselves into a small room and eventually, after much experimentation, sort out which part goes where. After eating breakfast, a man is transformed into an elaborate dumb-waiter-style breakfast dispenser - and the same fate befalls the man who obtains breakfast from him. A bust of Stalin is cut open on an operating table, leading to an elaborate animated depiction of Czech history from the Communist takeover to the Velvet Revolution.
A man sits down to watch a football match, which seems to consist of the players being violently mutilated in various inventive ways. The players then leave the football pitch and invade Three surreal depictions of failures of communication that occur on all levels of human society. The film uses a mix of cut-out animation from photographs and live-action segments, and tells the story of a married man who lives a double life in his dreams, where he is married to another woman.
I'm not sure it was the ideal place to start, because it doesn't seem to be a very accessible type of movie. The director stars as himself, playing a man in an unhappy marriage who's haunted by dreams of a beautiful woman. To that end, he begins visiting a psychiatrist, and that's where the fun really begins. The most arresting, and original thing, about the production is the animation.
With this being a surreal film, there's plenty of surrealist humour, mostly involving creatures with human heads or humans with animal heads. The story is where the film lets itself down a bit, because it doesn't really seem to be about much. There's no sense of pace or narrative structure, just endless repetition in the elaborate dream sequences and the real-life stuff, which is just as weird. The humour works, the jokes are funny, but the script isn't. By the end, I found it all slightly tiresome and wondered if it might have worked better as a short. Enjoy a night in with these popular movies available to stream now with Prime Video.
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The Films of Jan Svankmajer, in order of personal preference. Share this Rating Title: Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Learn more More Like This. Sadly, sometimes it takes something very traumatic or difficult to get us to wake up and look at the real quality of our lives.
Experience, obsession or desire must always be the reason. Sign in with Facebook Other Sign in options. These systems are a misguided form of self-care. Where does your desire to communicate come from? Add the first question. And, I do not care for any other work.
What do people mean when they talk about "quality of life"? They're actually talking about the way that they feel. They are talking about their emotions. What do people mean when they talk about "quality time"? They are talking about the emotional quality of the time that they spend with someone, or if it's "me" time, the emotional quality of the time that they have for themselves. In everything that we do and in every moment of our lives we are in a state of experience. And the quality of that experience, whether it's fabulous or challenging is defined by the way that we feel.
Surviving Life (Czech: Přežít svůj život) is a Czech comedy film by Jan Švankmajer, starring Václav Helšus, Klára Issová and Zuzana Kronerová. The film. Surviving Life See more» SURVIVING LIFE is my first Svankmajer film. in the elaborate dream sequences and the real-life stuff, which is just as weird.
It's defined by our emotions. Our emotions connect us to our deepest and most fundamental needs, to our yearnings and desires. They let us know when life is working for us and they also tell us when something is wrong, and yet for many people, their capacity to listen to their feelings and to understand this vital channel of communication is often limited and rarely at the top of their agenda. Our emotions are our navigational system.
They give us information all of the time and yet we frequently don't listen to this information. Sometimes we've learned not to listen and sometimes we simply haven't learned how to. Sometimes our emotional experiences were so traumatic that we developed ways of avoiding feeling at all costs. When difficult, painful and traumatic experiences happen and we don't understand what we're feeling, particularly during our childhood, we develop complex systems to alleviate our distress and to cope with the emotional overload.
One of the problems that results from these kinds of systems is that we end up shutting something of ourselves down.
When we distance ourselves from something that we don't want to feel, whilst we may manage to suppress the bits that we don't want, the chances are we also suppress some of the bits that we need. As human beings we're actually rubbish at being selective in this way.
Our emotions present a picture of our deepest experiences, both inner and outer, past and present. They are the absolute expression of relatedness and of relationship. If our emotions are telling us that something isn't okay, it's a valid communication, it's the voice of pure experience. It may be challenging but it's actually informing us. When something in us is crying out to be heard we need to listen and we need to respond.
When we shut down or suppress our emotions, however we do this and however we justify this to ourselves, whether we do this through alcohol, food or even excessive working hours, to name but a few, we are shutting down our capacity to be fully relational. We will be unable to listen to ourselves and be responsive to our deepest needs and in doing this we become closed to possibility and therefore closed to change and to resolution.
We are no longer living we are surviving.