Surviving Life

They give us information all of the time and yet we frequently don't listen to this information. Sometimes we've learned not to listen and sometimes we simply haven't learned how to. Sometimes our emotional experiences were so traumatic that we developed ways of avoiding feeling at all costs. When difficult, painful and traumatic experiences happen and we don't understand what we're feeling, particularly during our childhood, we develop complex systems to alleviate our distress and to cope with the emotional overload.

One of the problems that results from these kinds of systems is that we end up shutting something of ourselves down.

When we distance ourselves from something that we don't want to feel, whilst we may manage to suppress the bits that we don't want, the chances are we also suppress some of the bits that we need. As human beings we're actually rubbish at being selective in this way. Our emotions present a picture of our deepest experiences, both inner and outer, past and present. They are the absolute expression of relatedness and of relationship. If our emotions are telling us that something isn't okay, it's a valid communication, it's the voice of pure experience.

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It may be challenging but it's actually informing us. When something in us is crying out to be heard we need to listen and we need to respond.

Surviving Life - Film - European Film Awards

When we shut down or suppress our emotions, however we do this and however we justify this to ourselves, whether we do this through alcohol, food or even excessive working hours, to name but a few, we are shutting down our capacity to be fully relational. We will be unable to listen to ourselves and be responsive to our deepest needs and in doing this we become closed to possibility and therefore closed to change and to resolution.

We are no longer living we are surviving. Systems of survival are management systems and they are always connected to past situations and past experience. They are actually an incredibly creative enterprise and this should always be recognized and appreciated, however, as adults, if our creativity is tied into survival then we are investing energy in maintaining the residue of past experiences rather than investing fully in our current experience right now.

Directors Statement

When this happens we are not available to grow, there is no learning curve taking place. We are managing and maintaining something from the past, rather than learning and growing from the experience. We are stuck in the past rather than evolving from the past. These kinds of management systems are actually an attempt to find a solution to a problem but sometimes they can become the very things that block us from moving forwards in life.

The solution to the problem can become the problem. These systems are a misguided form of self-care. Self-care and self-defense are not the same thing, but they get muddled up. Self-care is about generating health and well-being; it comes from a responsive position; it's about living. Self-defense is about protection and generating safety; it comes from a reactive position; it's about surviving.

However logical you may think that you are, your emotions are a powerful driving force. In my latest film, I quote Lichtenberg as well as Novalis, both of whom say that it is dream and reality that together create a human life.

Surviving Life

This should apply all the more to art. After all, dream is one of the essential sources of imaginative creative work. And, I do not care for any other work. Creative work is a certain form of auto-therapy for me. Thus I liberate myself from the demons that moved in with me at some time during my childhood. If art has any sense at all, it lies in liberating man from domestication by civilisation and for it to be able to liberate the audience, then it must, first of all, liberate its creator.

In fact, it is playing at god". Surviving Life is very funny in places. Did you have a desire to make a more humorous film than some of your previous work? I do not think along those lines.

I realise ideas as they come to me and they themselves ask for the means of their realisation. The fact that it seems that this film works with less black humour than some of my other films has nothing to do with my own will. Where does your desire to communicate come from?

My work derives from other motives than the desire to communicate. I have never treated film as a means of communication above any other. In the same unrelenting way, I put collages together, assemble objects, make graphics, ceramics or I engage myself in tactile experimentation. The surrealists say that there is only one poetry and it does not matter which means we use to capture it. Surviving Life would seem to suggest we are products of our early experiences, some of which we barely remember - are we just the shadows cast on the wall by what has happened to us?

Jan Švankmajer: Surviving Life

Plato has never been my philosopher. Nevertheless, I agree with you and Sigmund Freud that we are the products of our early experiences. What do you personally believe dreams are? Freud says that dreams fulfill our most secret wishes. I could perhaps agree with that. But what definitely happens to me is that when my demons do not haunt me, I do not have dreams. But also my creative works steals my dreams. And, yes, I used this story from my childhood in my film.

Are You Living Or Are You Surviving? Can You Tell the Difference?

There is something Max Ernst-like about the people with the chicken heads in the film — why do you think we as a species are fascinated by hybrids? For me, creating hybrid creatures is a free game of the imagination. In fact, it is playing at god.

What ultimately would you say is the role of the artist in society?