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Jan Švankmajer’s films are not meant to be simply watched but they are created to be intensely experienced – they inescapably provide a powerful feeling of disorientation. Not only are reality, performance, memory and fantasy intersected, but the inhabitants of these “realities” switch from human beings, to objects, puppets, and fantastic figures made by a mixture of all the above. The space in which these characters move is a transitional space, a meeting point of oneiric reality, natural reality, and fictional reality, in which theatricality is often underlined. In this contribution, I would like to suggest that a semiotic approach along the line of the heritage of the Prague school could help to understand the audience’s peculiar reactions to Švankmajer’s continuous crossing of boundaries. Once we approach Švankmajer’s works from a semiotic point of view, we realize how freely he switches from one set of signs to another, dwelling specifically on the space between these systems, exploring, as a faithful surrealist, “the conjunctions, the points of contact, between different realms of existence” (RICHARDSON 2006: 3). The effect is one of bewilderment and unsettlement that ranges from comic to dread. In order to investigate how Švankmajer provokes these various reactions from his spectators, I would like to borrow some insights from the scholars of the Prague school about the distinctive quality of the sets of signs that shape each kind of performing art and provide as an example Švankmajer’s film Faust (Lekce Faust, 1994).

Animate, inanimate and beyond in Švankmajer's Faust (1994)