Surviving Life

At the beginning of Surviving Life, director Jan Svankmajer appears on screen. He didn’t have enough money for a completely live-action film, he says, so he occasionally added some animation. That’s a joke, of course, because the surrealist Svankmajer (1934) is world famous for his idiosyncratic mixture of animation and live action. This is where Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay found their inspiration.
Svankmajer’s first film in five years, since the death of his wife and regular co-worker Eva Svankmajerova, takes a slightly biographical approach. The protagonist Eugene lives both in the real world and in his own, lucid world of dreams. Both worlds are characterised by Svankmajer’s unmistakable black humour and surrealistic settings. Eugene falls in love with a woman from his dreams and asks for help from a psychoanalyst, seated under the quarrelling figures of Freud and Jung.

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