Smitten with Švankmajer

Prior to this weekend, I had only seen his short films and some clips from movies but thanks to a suggestion from my brother, I got to catch Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer's Lunacy in full at the Siskel Film Center. Švankmajer creates weird and wonderful dark films that drift toward the horror genre using a mix of live action and stop animation, often using clay or food as his medium and sometimes stop animating live actors, creating unnatural, nightmarish movement. If you haven't had a chance to see one of his films in a theater and you live in Chicago, you can still catch the tail end of the retrospective at the Siskel!

This is the first Švankmajer short I remember seeing: