Jan Svankmajer has made a great reputation for himself with his bizarre and surrealist short animation films. He has now dedicated his knowledge and experience to making a unique full-length feature in which his animation art is combined with scenes played by actors. Svankmajer’s Faust is literally a man of the street: a passer by picked in contemporary Prague. He is given a mysterious street plan. The man decides to follow the lines on the map and finds himself in the cellar of a derelict house. Here he finds the deserted dressing room of a theatre and a well-thumbed version of Goethe’s Faust. The man puts on the costume of Faust, reads the opening passage of the book and then disappears into a diabolical world. In that world the man ‘undergoes’ the many variations on the Faust story, from primitive medieval puppetry to Gounod’s opera. Like all the Fausts he also sells his soul to Lucifer/Mephisto/the devil. In this case, in exchange for twenty-four good years. The various worlds visited by Faust have been designed by Svankmajer with just as many stunning animation techniques.
