Jan Švankmajer

Jan Švankmajer is a Czech film director, animator, writer, playwright and artist. He draws and makes free graphics, collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages. In the early 1960s, he explored informel, which later became an important part of the visual form of his animated films. He is a leading representative of late Czech surrealism. In his film work, he created an unmistakable and quite specific style, determined primarily by a compulsively unorthodox combination of externally disparate elements. The anti-artistic nature of this process, based on collage or assemblage, functions as a meaning-making factor. The author himself claims that the intersubjective communication between him and the viewer works only through evoked associations, and his films fulfil their subversive mission only when, even in the most fantastic moments, they look like a record of reality. Some of the works he created together with his wife Eva Švankmajerová.

4 September 1934

Born on the same birth date (4 September 1934): Antoine Redin • Clive Granger • Eduard Khil

Born on the same birth day (4 September): Albert Orsborn • Bert Olmstead • Christian Walz • Dawn Fraser • Frank White (baseball) • Gerald Wilson • John Dillon • Lucie Silvas • Margit Rüütel • Max Greenfield • Oskar Schlemmer • Ramesh Sethi • Sarah Childress Polk • Yuichi Nakamaru

Born in the same month (September 1934): Anna Kashfi • Bernard Donoughue, Baron Donoughue • Dick Schaap • Elgin Baylor • Kevin McNamara (politician) • Larry Sitsky • Maureen Connolly • Per Olov Enquist • Peter Maxwell Davies • Rodrigue Biron • Ronnie Drew • Sarah Kofman • T. Somasekaram • Waldo de los Ríos • Wilford Brimley