* (restored)

 

‘If one were to place Jan Švankmajer in a schemata which might signal a point of access to his work, it might be as someone who anticipated the low-rent, anti-technology, quasi-documentary suggestiveness of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and coupled it with the tactility and cinematic bravura of Dario Argento’s more coherent visual ideas. This significantly undervalues the distinctiveness of Švankmajer’s approach, of course, but points up an important tension at the heart of his work between his conception of “fantastic documentary” and the fundamental principles of “militant surrealism.”

‘Animation readily facilitates this co-existence because its intrinsic artifice effectively creates an ontological equivalence in all aspects of the textual apparatus, imbuing it with the simultaneous capacity to both amplify meanings and imperatives in the materials used and images constructed, while also potentially diluting their significance by working as a model of expression which in enunciating its illusionism offers the possibility of “innocence” and “distanciation.” Simply, this is one of the reasons why animated films—from Disney cartoons to Japanese animé—can be both viewed as conservatively “mainstream” and subversively “left-field” depending upon how they are received and interpreted. The issue underpinning this, of course, remains animation’s enduring identity (and burden) as “children’s entertainment.”

‘Švankmajer refuses this ghetto, however, not merely through the ways in which he uses the free, and in some ways, unregulatable language of animation, but in the way he perceives “the child.” He suggests, “I’m not at all sure that any work of art is unsuitable for children. When children are confronted by something they can’t understand, [they engage with it] so that it works by analogy, or they simply reject it and carry on as before. Adults have a very distorted idea of a child’s world; they are crueller, more animalistic, than we like to admit.

‘The principles of desire live on in a child, who still hasn’t been domesticated by the world; its imagination is that much freer.” It is clear here that in suggesting there are no aesthetic boundaries that a child may not cross, Švankmajer is already challenging the socially and legally determined parameters of what is, and what is not suitable for children. In this respect, too, he signals modes of transgression which may be understood as the necessary imperatives of the artist in the facilitation of exploring new ideas, and the rejection of the restrictions of “citizenry” during that process.

‘The “horror” here resides in the recognition that humankind is fundamentally driven by obsessive and compulsive needs and desires, often rooted in childhood anxieties, and played out in dream-states. Švankmajer “frightens” by prompting recognition of transgression, and by physicalising alternative perspectives. Švankmajer contemporises and materialises the documentation of his agit-scares through the “fabrication” of his mise-en-scène, noting that “Animation can bring the imagery of childhood back to life and give it back its credibility,” adding “The animation of objects upholds the truth of our childhood.”‘ — Paul Wells, Kinoeye

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Jan Svankmajer Official Website
Jan Svankmajer Fan Page
The Jan Svankmajer Home Page
Jan Svankmajer page @ Facebook
‘The Decalogue of Jan Švankmajer’
Jan Svankmajer’s ‘Little Otik’ Diary
‘Jan Švankmajer: Animated Self-Portrait’
Jan Svankmajer interviewed @ Electric Sheep
Book: ‘The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy’
Jan Svankmajer DVDs

 

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General

The Brothers Quay ‘The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer’ — Watch it here

Jan Švankmajer – IFFR Big Talk

Jan.Svankmajer – J.S.Bach.Fantasia.in.G.Minor

Darkness Light Darkness (1990) by Jan Svankmajer

Hugh Cornwell Another Kind of Love [dir. Jan Švankmajer, 1988]

 

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Interview
by Wendy Jackson

 

Would it be bold to say that Conspirators of Pleasure is your most Surrealist film to date?

Jan Svankmajer: Conspirators is actually a film about liberation, and about gaining a freedom. It is not art, but a film. Just as, for example, André Breton would not say “Surrealistic painting”, he would say “Surrealism in painting”. In the same way, I speak of Surrealism in film. Surrealism is psychology, it is philosophy, it is a spiritual way, but it is not an aesthetic. Surrealism is not interested in actually creating any kind of aesthetic. It was drawn as an element from various different artists, but it does not exist.

How can something so prevalent in your work be non-existent?

JS: Surrealism does exist, but it is not an art form. To characterize Surrealism, you can say it is the Romantic movement of the 20th century. Each romantic period expresses three elements: love, freedom and poetry. Each generation is seeking their own artistic expressions according to the environment and the time period they live in. The Romanticism of the 21st century will ask the same question. It doesn’t matter whether that Romanticism will be Culturalism, or something else.

You are very versatile in your filmmaking and other art, with the use many different techniques. Can you tell me something about your process for determining which medium should be employed to communicate or express a particular idea?

JS: I always say that I basically make my work “to order”, by which I mean to my “inner order”. It is really inside me, what’s going to come out. The way I see it, each individual accumulates in his or her lifetime. That which accumulates inside him or her needs to find a way out. Basically, everybody can do that, but most people do not find a way of releasing it, they have certain blockage. There is no such thing as talent.

No such thing as talent? That is a bold statement.

JS: It’s very simple. The artist is able to reach their resources, and overcome the block. But a clerk who sits in the office, obviously, has his blockage and cannot. This so-called “professionalism”, is much more a matter of technique, or skill than creativity. You can see that in naive art, or folk art, if an individual wants to express him or herself, they find a way to do it if they really want to.

You grew up in a time of such oppression of creativity and self-expression. How is it that you are so “lucky” as to not have this block, that you are able to realize your potential to express yourself through art?

JS: It’s a difficult question to answer. I believe there is a lot to it, including family influences. Certain children are just very difficult to handle. I was one of these children (laughs). For example, all children can draw. Some of them retain this ability until adult age, while in other children the ability is subsequently killed.

Rightly, you are often referred to as the “alchemist” of film.

JS: Yes, alchemy is about trying to connect things that you cannot connect, that are “un-connectable”. Poetry is a parallel for alchemy, and alchemy is a parallel for poetry.

 

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13 of Jan Švankmajer’s 40 films

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Punch and Judy (1966)
‘Probably the most densely allusive, frenetically charged film ever made about puppets hitting each other, Jan Švankmajer’s Punch and Judy is pretty extraordinary. At their best his short films are as tightly structured as incantations, delivering a sequence of actions and a barrage of images that somehow add up to a perfectly arranged whole. That’s not to say that it’s easy or even possible to draw conclusions about what it means, what the conjuration of that incantation might be, and the lack of easy explanation for all of its imagery is unsettling. If I give a recap of the plot, it might all seem very simple. After a prologue in which a band of automaton monkeys introduce the opening titles before the curtain rises on the stage within the film. Mr Punch is caring for his guinea pig. His neighbour Joey (another stock character from the Punch and Judy stories – note that, despite the title, Judy, along with all the other characters, is nowhere to be seen) envies the guinea pig and tries to buy it. Mr Punch refuses every cash offer, and they settle the dispute with violence, each taking turns to stuff the other into a coffin. It all ends with both characters dead and boxed, while the guinea pig strolls away through a hole in the scenery.’ — Spectacular Attractions

the entirety

 

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Jabberwocky (1971)
‘The spanked arse that opens the film like the clapstick that marks the start of a kabuki performance is not the only similarity to Todd Haynes’ Superstar. Both films use dolls and their mutilation to explore the degradation of the subject in the process of socialisation. That is, dolls in both cases are made into metaphors for the ways people’s bodies are not their own, but the blank objects onto which are carved the pressures and injunctions of families and society. Svankmajer’s dolls start out as the innocent embodiments of childhood, playthings invested with life by the animation process. Quickly, their innocence is polluted, and they are put to work in a series of actions that knock them into submissive shape. Birthed out of the inert body of a larger doll, they are installed in a house that spins them round and spits them out to be ground into food for more dolls. They are ironed flat, boiled and baked to sustain a cannibalistic circle of stunted life and grotesque death.’ — Spectacular Attractions

the entirety

 

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The Fall of the House of Usher (1980)
‘Even without understanding the voiceover (in softly lulling Czech) Svankmajer’s film soaks up the mysterious gloom of Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic story of death, doppelgangers and the claustraphobic weight of history. Like the story, it’s the house, brooding in the dusky light, that is the main character in Svankmajer’s film, dominating the landscape of barren trees and pulsating from foundation to roof with doom. Freed from any pesky humans (or even puppet people) to carry the narrative, it’s also the atmospheric house that Svankmajer uses to tell the tale, in crumbling plaster moulding itself into tormented shapes, words appearing out of dead leaves, blank faces appearing in walls and a coffin silently, clunkily and apparently singlemindedly weaving its own way through the rooms. This short film might be the best unlikely example of Svankmajer’s belief in the memories of materials and objects, and in the power of animation to free those memories.’ — The Spectral Dimension

the entirety

 

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Dimensions of Dialogue (1982)
‘Divided into three separate dialogues entitled ‘Exhaustive Discussion,’ ‘Passionate Discourse’ and ‘Factual Conversation,’ Svankmajer indeed exhausts the subject of social interaction in this unbounded critique of human malfeasance. In the first dialogue, two anthropomorphized assemblages of food-stuffs and kitchen utensils respectively lurch towards one another with the latter devouring the former. In turn, this pattern is repeated when a collection of intellectual markers vies with the kitchen products destroying the returning collage with similarly ease. Next it is the now degraded food objects which sully the books, paints, etc., as though the two were mingling in some fictious trash bin. This process of disintegration continues with the resulting forms appearing closer and closer to the form of man himself.’ — Tativille

the entirety

 

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Alice (1988)
‘After more than two decades as a prolific director of short films, Alice became Švankmajer’s first venture into feature-length filmmaking. The director had been disappointed by other adaptations of Carroll’s book, which interpret it as a fairy tale. His aim was instead to make the story play out like an amoral dream. Alice appears to be in her bedroom when a taxidermically stuffed rabbit comes to life and breaks out of its glass case. Alice follows the rabbit through the drawer of a desk into a cavern. She subsequently falls through a bucket and seemingly down an elevator shaft. Wonderland itself is a mix of drab household-like areas with incongruous relationships of space and size. The Queen’s execution sentences are carried out by the White Rabbit with a pair of scissors. At the film’s end, Alice wakes in her room, discovers that the rabbit is still missing from his glass case, and finds a secret compartment where he keeps scissors. She ponders whether or not she will cut his head off. The film is ambiguous about whether this room is Alice’s real world or “Wonderland.”‘ — Wikipedia

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Meat Love (1989)
‘Meat Love is a short film directed and animated by Jan Švankmajer, released in 1989. It appears as a commercial in Švankmajer’s feature-length film Otesánek. It has also been shown on MTV. It depicts two slices of steak, personified as two individual beings with a consciousness, that become aware of each other and form a romantic relationship, showing the steaks dancing with one another. This soon leads to passionate love, exemplified by the steaks rolling around on a plate of flour, which can be seen to symbolise sexual intercourse. Their passion is killed, however, when the steaks are placed in a frying pan.’ — Marked Animation

the entirety

 

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The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (1990)
‘In 1990, the year after the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, Jan Svankmajer made The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia and subtitled it “A work of Agitprop.” As these titles plainly demonstrate, it is the most political of all his films, attempting an overview of his country’s history after the Second World War. It is commonly believed that overt political comment within a work can badly affect its artistic value. The complexity and sophistication of artistic language is too often weakened when faced with the simplicity of political vocabulary. Accordingly, from the standpoint of the work of art, the relationship between art and politics is extremely delicate. Despite this, Svankmajer made an explicitly political film. Did he sacrifice the artistic value? If so, to what end? And what significance does the film have to its creator? It is a film that reveals the characteristics of Jan Svankmajer the Militant Surrealist. Svankmajer recognizes that Stalinism in its many guises is just one symptom of contemporary civilization, a civilization he believes that art must attack at its roots. It seems that Svankmajer intends to continue the fight against the absurdities of the human beings by means of his surrealist art.’ — The Slavic Research Center

the entirety

 

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Faust (1994)
‘Svankmajer’s long awaited follow-up to his acclaimed Alice is an equally astounding version of the myth of Dr. Faustus. Merging live action with stop-motion and claymation animation, Svankmajer has created an unsettling universe presided over by diabolic life-sized marionettes and haunted by skulking human messengers from hell. Svankmajer’s Faust (movingly incarnated by one of the Czech Republic’s finest actors, Petr Cepek) is an ordinary, inquisitive everyman who, upon exiting a Prague subway station, is handed a map that draws him to his doom. Led to an abandoned theater he finds a copy of Goethe’s Faust, begins to read aloud, and unwittingly summons up a devil who offers him everything his heart desires in return for his soul. With breathtaking rapidity, Faust’s journey takes him to the tops of mountains, drops him in the middle of lakes, and sends him out onto the unsuspecting streets of Prague. Peopled with shape-changing demons and puppet versions of Goethe’s characters, Svankmajer’s tour-de-force is alternately hilarious and shocking, always unique, and ultimately unforgettable.’ — kino

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)
‘Svankmajer’s newest over-the-brink creation is Conspirators of Pleasure, the absorbing story of an obsessive handful of hardcore sexual fetishists whose lives intersect and dance around one other in serendipitous fashion. Conspirators of Pleasure is an erotic film, although not in the ways that we usually think of eroticism on film. That is, while sexuality is the film’s subject, the titillation factor here is low. For the most part, the characters remain fully clothed throughout. Importantly, there is no sexual intercourse, per se. Nobody talks dirty, because there’s no dialogue at all. Like pornography, communication here is almost completely nonverbal. What’s most gratifying to these motley sensualists — even the married couple, who pursue their own desires separately — is self-gratification. The film itself begins methodically, cross-cutting from story to story and growing ever more complicated as each minute passes. Finally, it achieves its own sort of orgasm, as the stories cross and interconnect, reaching a delirious climax and then a comedown — a disturbing resolution in the best surrealist tradition.’ — deep focus

Trailer

Excerpt

Watch the entirety here

 

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Little Otik (2000)
‘With his latest feature, Little Otik, Svankmajer is poised to move out of the ghetto tag of animator and take his place as a cinema visionary who happens to use animation in his films. Little Otik is based on a Czech fairy tale about a childless couple who adopt a tree stump that looks like a baby. As usual with fairy tales, any deviation from normal behavior triggers disaster — in this case the stump comes to life, grows huge, and starts murdering and eating everybody and everything in its path. Svankmajer, who’s credited with story, screenplay, and direction, uses this narrative as a springboard for a genre-busting masterpiece about the perils of parenthood and what can happen to those who don’t leave well enough alone with the status quo nature has determined.’ — Morphizm

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Lunacy (2005)
‘The latest provocation from surrealist master Jan Svankmajer is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade. In nineteenth-century France (albeit one full of deliberate anachronisms) a young man, Jean Berlot, is plagued by nightmares in which he is dragged off to a madhouse. On the journey back from his mother’s funeral he is invited by a Marquis he meets at lunch to spend the night in his castle. There Berlot witnesses a blasphemous orgy and a ‘therapeutic’ funeral. Berlot tries to flee but the Marquis insists on helping him conquer his fears and takes his guest to a surrealistic lunatic asylum where the patients have complete freedom and the staff are locked up behind bars. Described by Svankmajer himself in a prologue to the film as a ’philosophical horror film,” Lunacy combines live action and stop-motion, sex and violence, grand guignol terror and gallows humor, and a lot of animated meat.’ — zeitgeist films

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010)
‘Eugene, an aging man, leads a double life: one real – the waking life he spends in the company of his wife of many years, Milana – and the other in his dreams, his sleeping hours being devoted to a recurring evolving dream of a beautiful young woman, Evgenia. Seeking to perpetuate his dream life, he goes to see a psychoanalyst, who attempts to provide an ongoing interpretation of his experiences. On the wall there are portraits of Freud and Jung, which become animated, alternately applauding, disapproving or fighting over her interpretations. The latest film from practising surrealist animator Jan vankmajer is a mix of cut-out animation from photographs and live action segments, combining real actors with their animated photographs, against black and white backdrops of photographed Czech buildings. This stylistic approach which, Svankmajer jokes during the films introduction, was due to lack of funds and saved on catering, provides freedom for imaginative collages, and humorous nods in the direction of some of surrealism’s familiar practitioners (Dalí, Ernst, Buñuel). Drawn directly from Svankmajer’s own dreams, the film is a complex, multilayered story about aging, love, sex, childhood, trauma and dreams, steeped in Freudian and Jungian analysis and injected with a healthy dose of perversity. As Eugene labors in different versions of reality, Svankmajer’s own deeply curious take on reality manifests in all its surrealist splendor.’ — RT

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Insects (2018)
‘Lesser works by great directors needn’t diminish long-standing reputations, so calling Jan Švankmajer’s “Insect” a disappointment in no way weakens the master’s position as a key proponent of surrealist cinema. However, there’s no getting around the fact that the film is a minor entry in a glorious career, despite having all the raw ingredients for a classic Švankmajer stew. Based on the 1922 satirical play “Pictures From the Insects’ Life” by the Čapek brothers, in which performers dressed as bugs expose the thin line between human and insect behavior, the film takes a meta approach, with the director himself acting as commentator (as in “Surviving Life”) to the story of a provincial amateur production.’ — Jay Weissberg

Trailer

Jan Svankmajer introduces his last feature film.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Yep, if a writer is suicidal, I’ll eventually showcase him, it appears. There’s one reason why I intend to never read Proust. My brain’s too flighty, I think. So nice that living in solitude is paying off and righting whatever wrongs. Your explanation of ‘Expedition 33’s’ reason for popularity makes total sense of course. Games are not unlike movies in that sense. I’m doing pretty good. Like you to some degree. Is it freezing there? It’s freezing here. ** Vincent, Hi, Vincent! No, I don’t know ‘Untold Night and Day’, but I’ll seek it out certainly. Thanks a lot. How are you? ** adrian, Hi. Sorry we’ll miss each other this time, but try to come again soon. ** Nicholas., Thanks about Mom. I think she’s a rather underrated character. Stanya’s amazing. We wrote the film hoping she’d agree to play that role, and she did. She makes these great videos, sometimes with Harry Dodge, that she stars in. They’re very worth hunting down if you like her. I like cumdumps. Or I guess theoretically since I don’t any personally that I know of. Probably ‘that I know of’ is the key there. Something good … If you say something is sky-colored rather than blue, you’re showing it more respect. ** Carsten, I’m aways very happy to have guest-posts under any circumstances, so thank you. What you wrote made me feel happy that I don’t own anything. Other than a car. I know of Turtle Island Press. I don’t know if that’s the same venture. Anyway, sounds cool, congrats. Assuming their thing is Gary Snyder influenced or homage-y? ** Lucas, What a great paragraph about that book! Cool about the party, and I think connecting with even one person is a lot. It’ll be nice here in April. Well, it’s always nice here exact maybe in August. Great. Mm, I think I’ll wait until the script is nailed down before I say too much about it because a lot can change in the final draft, you know? I should quit smoking too, but I won’t. But you should. Smoking sucks. ** _Black_Acrylic, Here too. Really cold, very brr. But pretty through a window. And we got a good four hours of snow yesterday, which is monumental for Paris these years. ** Dev, You know it. The book. Yeah, really something, right? I know for sure ‘PGL’ is on Kanopy and I think ‘Cattle’ is, but I’m not totally sure. No Kanopy in Paris for me to check. I hope the grind’s challenge has a lovely percolating aspect somehow. ** Steve, No, I haven’t seen the Ruiz. Luck at the repair shop. How weird that NYPL doesn’t give its adherents Kanopy access. What’s that about? ** darbz (⊙ _ ⊙ ), And miraculously my market suddenly restocked those falafels I like yesterday. When I get to NC, I’ll follow you around, trust me. I like(d) coke, but it’s not an important enough high to risk not getting back on your meds, that’s for sure. And you just proved you don’t need it. I’m 100% in favor of medication that works. Generalisations are bullshit, so being against, say, Adderall and Vyvanse across the board is just lazy thinking. Poems! xo. ** Steeqhen, Maybe Kanopy is a US only thing. That would make sense, I guess. I trust you made it out of the barber shop in one piece. You talked with Jack, nice. I still have never watched even two seconds of ‘Stranger Things’, but I might one of these days. Nothing against it. ** HaRpEr //, Yay re: your medicating! Strange can be a positive thing obviously. Can you feel anything yet? Garielle Lutz is definitely among the very tippy-top greatest sentence writers in the English language, if you ask me. So happy you saw and liked ‘‘Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles’. That girl/actress is so unbelievably good in it, right? Wow, I’m shocked that it’s in youtube. I’ve looked for it so many times. I’ll pass that along. Wow. Everyone, Harper has found a link whereby you can watch the very hard to see and very fantastic Chantal Akerman film ‘Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles’, and I super extremely highly recommend that you take this opportunity. Here. Thanks!!!! ** Laura, I know extremely little about the history of Iran, which I really should rectify. Some of the things you say Verlaine did are not factually proven and have been labeled as exaggerations by some knowledgeable Verlaine scholars. I can’t say that I agree with you that the split with Verlaine was a reason why Rimbaud quit writing. I think it’s an idea, but there are so many other speculations too. No one actually knows when he stopped writing, for one thing. I’m happy to embrace the unknowable. ‘Confusion is the truth’ is my lifelong motto. Yeah, Yury said ‘let me think about it’, and he hasn’t proposed an answer yet. I’ll nudge. Reading Reddit seems like enough. No presents, for me too, on the respective day over here, but who needs presents really? I may not be in the pink, but I’m close. Yeah, send whatever, just knowing that I’m way, way behind on things due to said illness and probably even slower than I usually famously am. Thank you! ** Right. Do any of you out there like Jan Švankmajer’s stuff? I hope so. See you tomorrow.

* (restored/expanded)

 

‘My shadow on the wall was exactly like an owl; hunched over, it carefully read my writings… I wanted to draw those eyes, which were now closed forever, on a piece of paper, and keep them for myself. This sensation forced me to action, that is, I did not do this voluntarily — one does not when one is imprisoned with a corpse. This very thought filled me with a special feeling of joy.’ — Sadegh Hedayat

‘Perhaps no other modern Iranian writer has been claimed by his countrymen more than Sadegh Hedayat has. Born in Tehran in 1903 to an aristocratic family, Hedayat studied in Paris and went on to become one of the founders of modern fiction in Iran. And while he had a wide range—he wrote nationalist plays, satire, and both realist and surrealist fiction—he is most recognized for his novel The Blind Owl. Published in 1937 in a limited edition in India, where Hedayat was then living, the novel appeared in Iran in 1941 and went on to have a tumultuous existence in the hands of Iran’s ubiquitous censors. Translated into multiple languages, it has been reissued in the United States by Grove Press, with a 1957 translation by D. P. Costello and a poignant introduction by Porochista Khakpour.

‘A tale of one man’s isolation, the novel contains a maze of symbols, recurring images, social commentary, allusions to opium-induced states, contemplations of the human condition, interjections on art, and references to literary and religious texts—all of which have, for decades, made it fertile ground for critical interpretation. The most long-standing theory was espoused by the Iranian Communist Party (Tudeh), with which Hedayat for a time sympathized. The Tudeh’s claim was that the black mood in the book is an allusion to life under Reza Shah, who ruled Iran from 1925 until 1941. But as scholar Homa Katouzian points out in Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer, while Hedayat did oppose the shah’s tyrannical reign, the book is a far more universal statement about alienation. Often compared to the work of Franz Kafka (whom Hedayat admired), The Blind Owl also brings to mind Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet in its stark meditation on dejection.

‘“There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker,” begins the book, and in the pages that ensue we glimpse this solitude, through the narrator’s room, which “stands upon the ruins of thousands of ancient houses… like a tomb”; through the landscape of “crouching, accursed trees,” between which there are “ash-grey houses” where “no living creature could ever have dwelt”; and through the narrator’s estrangement from the “rabble-men” who bear “an expression of greed on their faces, in pursuit of money and sexual satisfaction.”

‘An ethereal girl appearing throughout offers hope. She is the image the narrator paints on his pen cases, a vision he falls in love with, and the portrait on an ancient jar, inside “an almond-shaped panel” (perhaps a reference to a mandorla, an almond-shaped contour found around images of Mary—the almond representing virgin birth). But the girl has a “double nature,” resurfacing as the narrator’s cunning mother, and, later, as his promiscuous wife.

‘Any discussion of Hedayat would be incomplete without mention of his suicide, by gassing, in 1951 in Paris—an event that has overshadowed his work.

‘On April 9, 1951, Sadegh Hedayat entered his rented apartment in Paris, plugged all the doors and windows with cotton, and then turned on the gas valve to liberate himself from all the wounds that had been gnawing on him in seclusion. Two days later, his body was found by police, with a note left behind for his friends and companions that read: “I left and broke your heart. That is all.” The prominent Iranian writer and intellectual had torn up all his unpublished work a few days before his suicide.’ — Dalia Sofer

 

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Talking with a Shadow (2006)

‘Documentary about the life and works of Sadegh Hedayat. It follows a teacher, a researcher, and a journalist as they discuss some of Hedayat’s most famous works and their influences. The film intermixes the three conversing along with a narrated history of the author with images.’

Watch the film here

 

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From No. 37 (2009)

‘From No. 37 is an Iranian documentary about Persian author Sadegh Hedayat. It was directed by Sam Kalantari and Mohsen Shahrnazdar. From No. 37 lasts 90 minutes and was filmed in France, Iran, Norway and the United Kingdom. From No. 37 explores the private life and works of Hedayat. The film includes interviews with Iranian authors, intellectuals and academics including Homa Katouzian, Nasser Pakdaman, Anvar Khamei, Ehsan Naraghi, and some of Hedayat’s relatives. The film’s dialogue is in Persian with English and French subtitles. It premiered at the Persian Artists Forum in Tehran and the British Academy in London.’

 

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Further

Sadegh Hedayat’s Corner 
Sadegh Hedayat Tribute Page 
‘This Book Will End Your Life’@ The Rumpus 
Sadegh Hedayat @ Les éditions José Corti 
‘Sadeq Hedayat’s Heritage’ 
Sadegh Hedayat’s ‘Davood the Hunchback’ 
Sadegh Hedayat Page (in Iranian) 
‘The Symbolism of Women in The Blind Owl’ 
‘The Blind Owl’ @ Resistance is Futile 
‘Poisons and Remedies in The Blind Owl’ 
‘What is left for me from Sadegh Hedayat?’ 
Buy ‘The Blind Owl’

 

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Media

Naked Solitude: Sadegh Hedayat

‘The Blind Owl’, an extract

Omar Khayyam-Sadegh Hedayat

Tomb of Sadegh Hedayat

 

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Adaptation

Raoul Ruiz La Chouette Aveugle (1987)
‘A projectionist falls in love with a dancer that he sees onscreen and finds echoes of his own life in the images he projects. Everything changes when fiction and reality merge… For Ruiz, La Chouette aveugle was not so much an adaptation as an adoption of the novel written by Sadegh Hedayat. Free composition in a labyrinthine narrative, this explosion of imagination and creation celebrates the fantastical power of cinema in a fictional continuity, mixing past and present, dream and reality. An existential work as well as gigantic hoax, this flamboyant, this baroque jewel is as enchanting as it is extravagant.’ — pariscinema.org

Excerpts

 

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Book

Sadegh Hedayat The Blind Owl
Grove Press

‘Plot summary: The narrator, a pen-case decorator, falls in love with a girl who is at once angelic and devilish. Later, the girl appears by his doorstep, enters his house, and lies on his bed, where she dies. He cuts up her body and buries her. The narrator, seemingly in a past life, recounts his mental and physical decline following his marriage to a woman who refuses to have sex with him but has countless lovers. He accidentally kills her; Main characters: the narrator (present and past), the girl/narrator’s mother/narrator’s wife, an old peddler/narrator’s father/narrator’s uncle, a butcher;? Representative sentence: “If I have now made up my mind to write it is only in order to reveal myself to my shadow.”’ — The Believer

 

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Excerpt

There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.

It is impossible to convey a just idea of the agony which this disease can inflict. In general, people are apt to relegate such inconceivable sufferings to the category of the incredible. Any mention of them in conversation or in writing is considered in the light of current beliefs, the individual’s personal beliefs in particular, and tends to provoke a smile of incredulity and derision. The reason for this incomprehension is that mankind has not yet discovered a cure for this disease. Relief from it is to be found only in the oblivion brought about by wine and in the artificial sleep induced by opium and similar narcotics. Alas, the effects of such medicines are only temporary. After a certain point, instead of alleviating the pain, they only intensify it.

Will anyone ever penetrate the secret of this disease which transcends ordinary experience, this reverberation of the shadow of the mind, which manifests itself in a state of coma like that between death and resurrection, when one is neither asleep nor awake?

I propose to deal with only one case of this disease. It concerned me personally and it so shattered my entire being that I shall never be able to drive the thought of it out of my mind. The evil impression which it left has, to a degree that surpasses human understanding, poisoned my life for all time to come. I said “poisoned”: I should have said that I have ever since borne, and will bear for ever, the brand mark of that cautery.

I shall try to set down what I can remember, what has remained in my mind of the sequence of events. I may perhaps be able to draw a general conclusion from it all – but no, that is too much to expect. I may hope to be believed by others or at least to convince myself; for, after all, it does not matter to me whether others believe me or not. My one fear is that tomorrow I may die without having come to know myself. In the course of my life I have discovered that a fearful abyss lies between me and other people and have realized that my best course is to remain silent and keep my thoughts to myself for as long as I can. If I have now made up my mind to write it is only in order to reveal myself to my shadow, that shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the attitude of one devouring with insatiable appetite each word I write. It is for his sake that I wish to make the attempt. Who knows? We may perhaps come to know each other better. Ever since I broke the last ties which held me to the rest of mankind, my one desire has been to attain a better knowledge of myself.

Idle thoughts! Perhaps. Yet they torment me more savagely than any reality could do. Do not the rest of mankind who look like me, who appear to have the same needs and the same passion as I, exist only in order to cheat me? Are they not a mere handful of shadows which have come into existence only that they may mock and cheat me? Is not everything that I feel, see and think something entirely imaginary, something utterly different from reality?

I am writing only for my shadow, which is now stretched across the wall in the light of the lamp. I must make myself known to him.

In this mean world of wretchedness and misery I thought that for once a ray of sunlight had broken upon my life. Alas, it was not sunlight but a passing gleam, a falling star, which flashed upon me, in the form of a woman – or of an angel. In its light, in the course of a second, of a single moment, I beheld all the wretchedness of my existence and apprehended the glory and splendour of the star. After, that brightness disappeared again in the whirlpool of darkness in which it was bound inevitably to disappear. I was unable to retain that passing gleam.

It is three months – no, it is two months and four days – since I lost her from sight but the memory of those magic eyes, of the fatal radiance of those eyes, has remained with me at all times. How can I forget her, who is so intimately bound up with my own existence?

No, I shall never utter her name. For now, with her slender, ethereal, misty form, her great, shining, wondering eyes, in the depths of which my life has slowly and painfully burned and melted away, she no longer belongs to this mean, cruel world. No, I must not defile her name by contact with earthly things.

After she had gone I withdrew from the company of man, from the company of the stupid and the successful and, in order to forget, took refuge in wine and opium. My life passed, and still passes, within the four walls of my room. All my life has passed within four walls.

I used to work through the day, decorating the covers of pen cases. Or, rather, I spent on my trade of pen-case decorator the time that I did not devote to wine and opium. I had chosen this ludicrous trade of pen-case decorator only in order to stupefy myself, in order somehow or other to kill time.

I am fortunate in that the house where I live is situated beyond the edge of the city in a quiet district far from the noise and bustle of life. It is completely isolated and around it lie ruins. Only on the far side of the gully one can see a number of squat mud-brick houses which mark the extreme limit of the city. They must have been built by some fool or madman heaven knows how long ago. When I shut my eyes not only can I see every detail of their structure but I seem to feel the weight of them pressing on my shoulders. They are the sort of houses which one finds depicted only on the covers of ancient pen cases.

I am obliged to set all this down on paper in order to disentangle the various threads of my story. I am obliged to explain it all for the benefit of my shadow on the wall. Yes, in the past only one consolation, and that a poor one, remained to me. Within the four walls of my room I painted my pictures on the pen cases and thereby, thanks to this ludicrous occupation of mine, managed to get through the day. But when once I had seen those two eyes, once I had seen her, activity of any sort lost all meaning, all content, all value for me.

I would mention a strange, an incredible thing. For some reason unknown to me the subject of all my painting was from the very beginning one and the same. It consisted always of a cypress tree at the foot of which was squatting a bent old man like an Indian fakir. He had a long cloak wrapped about him and wore a turban on his head. The index finger of his left hand was pressed to his lips in a gesture of surprise. Before him stood a girl in a long black dress, leaning towards him and offering him a flower of morning glory. Between them ran a little stream. Had I seen the subject of this picture at some time in the past or had it been revealed to me in a dream? I do not know. What I do know is that whenever I sat down to paint I reproduced the same design, the same subject. My hand independently of my will always depicted the same scene. Strangest of all, I found customers for these paintings of mine. I even dispatched some of my pen-case covers to India through the intermediary of my paternal uncle, who used to sell them and remit the money to me.

Somehow I always felt this subject to be remote and, at the same time, curiously familiar to me. I don’t remember very well… It occurs to me that I once said to myself that I must write down what I remember of all this – but that happened much later and has nothing to do with the subject of my painting. Moreover, one consequence of this experience was that I gave up painting altogether. That was two months, or, rather exactly, two months and four days ago.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** adrian, Hi, adrian. I’m doing better, thanks, and, yeah, illness has been going around over here. Oh, sure, having coffee should be good. I guess hit me up with your schedule and availability, and we’ll sort it out. Nice. Safe trip to here. ** Daniel Warner, Hey, no big, I’ve been a bit disoriented myself. Mall Punk Magazine … wow, I don’t remember that. If I have a copy it must in storage somewhere. Huh. ‘The Plague’, no, I don’t know it, but I’ll look for it, for sure. Thanks! ** _Black_Acrylic, Definitely not a liqueur guy on this end either. When I did drink alcohol, I was a vodka guy. I’ll check that track, cool, thanks, B! ** Carsten, Hey. No words about the US horror of the weekend. Better a poet’s perspective than a voyeur’s thrill. Well, if the construction is illegal and you don’t mind the headache and, ugh, expense (?), you should win, no? ** Lucas, Hi! I repeated 8th grade way back when because I was a year younger than the other students due to me having skipped a grade caused by my supposed precocious intelligence, and, yeah, the repeat was nothing but a good thing. Plus I got to be actually good at school for that one year. Paris possibility: cool. 2026 first goal is finishing the new film script finally and setting up RT screenings. No, we’re not going for the next group of screenings, but we will for a few in March/April. So hopefully I’ll be jetlag free for a month or so. xo. ** Steeqhen, ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ had very memorable music. I can still hum it. Do UK libraries give card holders free access to the film streaming store Kanopy as in the US? That’s a really good resource, if so. Great stuff there including both of Zac’s and my previous films. ** Dustin, Hi. Yes, master as an apple and slave as gravity. That was novel. I was sick, but I’m better now, thanks. I don’t think I’ve specifically done a RPG games-centric post, if memory series. Good idea. And in the meantime I’ll see what ‘Yume Nikki’ and ‘LISA’ look like. Sounds like they’ll hit the spot. What’s keeping you busy? ** Florian S. Fauna, I will let you know once I’ve spun the album. Look forward to it. Thanks, and I hope you’re feeling very fit. ** darbz (⊙ _ ⊙ ), I do remember you’re from NC. I really want to get down there and check it out one of these years. When you find some great grotesque non-fiction, pass the titles on. I’m down. I think my sickness is all but kaput. Feels like it, but I’m not counting my chickens or whatever. That’s odd, my local market stopped carrying these falafels I always bought and ate religiously, and it’s a loss. The replacement product here is sadly inadequate, ** Steve, I peeked at that ‘UM’ reboot, and it was blah. My back is virtually normal again, with maybe one more day of being gingerly with it. All hail your return to liveliness. ** Laura, Hey. Verlaine wasn’t such a big schmuck, was he? He seemed self-destructive if anything. I try to stay away from second- and third-hand autobiography. The truth is very complicated, and people are very lazy. I’m doing better, yes, thanks. I’ve never joined Reddit, should I? I feel like peeking at it is probably enough? ** Hugo, Nice sounding visit. Nice artistic input. Enjoy hanging with James, he’s great (like you). I’m post-meds now, so I guess that means I’m as fixed as I’m going to be. Oh, um, well, most of my earlier poems were written when I was still working out how to write fiction, so it would make sense if I was experimenting with narrative in them, whereas the poems in ‘The Weaklings’ came after I’d primarily become a novelist, so it would make sense if I felt freer to tackle them starting from nowhere? Keep enjoying the big L. ** Jeff J, All thanks to you! I’m still in the early stages of listening, but when individual tracks start popping in particular I will feed you back. I should be around approx. the 12th. It’d be swell to Zoom and obviously to investigate an ‘RT’ screening. Where are you going? Or I guess you’re probably there already. A ‘Wanda’ vibe is only a plus to me. Cool, I’ll take the leap. ** Okay. You’ll be getting some restored posts for the next few days due to my recent sickness and consequent inability to come up with brand new posts, and let’s start by re-spotlighting Sadegh Hedayat’s great novel. See you tomorrow.