Abstract
Jan Švankmajer does not appear to be a filmmaker to whom words come easily. Many of the short films for which he is best known (including all but one of the eleven shorts collected in the BFI’s two-volume selection of his work)1 are characterised by a wholesale rejection of the spoken word. Few contemporary directors are capable of making feature-length movies that contain not a single word of dialogue, but Švankmajer achieved this in his 1996 film Conspirators of Pleasure. Some of his experimental techniques might even be said to call into question the need for inventing Vitaphone.
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Notes
Jan Svankmajer, Svankmajer (2 Vols), Argos Films/British Film Institute/Connoisseur Video, 1991.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969), p. 295. Hereafter TI.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 1981, p. 279. Hereafter DI.
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1984, p. 237. Hereafter PDP.
Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 1994, p. 6.
See Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, 1990. Hereafter AA.
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© 2005 David Rudrum
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Rudrum, D. (2005). Silent Dialogue: Philosophising with Jan Švankmajer. In: Read, R., Goodenough, J. (eds) Film as Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524262_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524262_7
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