Jan Švankmajer’s conscious and unconscious worlds

Introduction

The portrayal of a character’s subjective, ‘inner’ experience onscreen is an enduring challenge for the filmmaker. Many techniques for conveying fantasies or dreams, such as blurring the frame’s edges, cross-dissolves and bleached colour, have been used – from soap operas to advertising – to such an extent that they could be considered by audiences as hackneyed or clichéd. Yet the notion that cinema cannot deal with complex psychological states such as dream, memory, the imagination and the unconscious seems to be tied up not only with clichéd imagery, but also with the derision of film as a passive visual and aural experience that leaves little to the imagination.  For instance, George Bluestone insists that the rendition of mental states cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language: “If the film has difficulty presenting streams of consciousness, it has even more difficulty presenting states of mind which are defined precisely by the absence in them of the visible world” (Bluestone 1971: 47). Frequently, when the topic of imaginative engagement with film arises, so does the claim that in visual texts much of the imagination’s work is done for us.  Malcolm Turvey (1997: 435) points out that in projecting representations of narrative content, images in film perform the work of the imagination for spectators.  In other words, because the ‘mental content’ in film – that is the material with which the imagination works – is also already an image, the viewer does not need to engage with the creative level of imagining that takes place when reading, whereby mental images are evoked by linguistic signifiers.

I do not contest the difficulty of rendering mental states in cinematic terms, but I do believe that cinema, and animation in particular, has at its disposal its own armoury of techniques for conveying interiority, and that these are able to engage the imagination thoroughly, leaving it to forge connections – to ‘do work’, as it were.  As a practising filmmaker, I find it informative to analyse particular cinematic examples – in order to dispel the notion that the medium is ill-equipped to screen psychologically complex states, and to seek inspiration for doing so in fresh ways.

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