Published 23 June 201126 March 2012 · Reviews / Main Posts / Culture At the Sydney Film Festival: Surviving Life Peter Francis Surviving Life Director: Jan Švankmajer ★★★ Czech director Jan Švankmajer’s Surviving Life is a whole movie in the style of Terry Gilliam’s animations. Or, more accurately, Gilliam’s animations are in the style of Švankmajer, who was a major influence on the Monty Python member. In an amusing introduction Švankmajer explains the film is a ‘psychoanalytic comedy’. He continues to say that the stop-motion style has been used in place of live-action because that was too expensive. The story has its origin, he says, in one dream he had, which he then wrote the rest of the scenes around. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant; Surviving Life is a surrealist film where the only reality is dreams. The film tells the story of Eugene (Václav Helšus) who is bored with his banal but contented existence. More and more he escapes into vivid dreams of a mysterious woman in red. He comes to treasure these dreams more than anything else and when they don’t occur, seeks help from a psychoanalyst as well as pursuing his own means of recapturing this second life. The film is a diligent student of both Freud and Jung. Dr. Holubová (Daniela Bakerová) explains the dreams variously as Eugene’s anima and as an Oedipus complex. Photographs of the two famed psychologists regularly come to blows hanging in Dr. Holubová’s office. The film is quite funny, largely due to its surrealism, unpredictable mise-en-scene and bizarre cutaways from the action. It is set in a black and white Czech Republic populated with chickens, snakes, chicken heads on the bodies of naked women, bulldog heads on the bodies of men in suits, giant eggs and dozens of other strange and sometimes gruesome images. Near the end of the film Švankmajer ties the many loose ends up in one monologue delivered by a previously unintroduced old wise man. Though the conclusion is a hilarious psychoanalytic conundrum I felt it would have been better left hinted at rather than the answers given in this way, which felt like a synopsis of the story dropped into the audience’s lap in case they didn’t know what had been happening in the previous hour and a half. Peter Francis Peter Francis is a student at UTS undertaking a Communications degree and majoring in Writing and Cultural Studies. This in no way prepares him for life outside university. More by Peter Francis › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 28 March 202428 March 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. First published in Overland Issue 228 7 March 20247 March 2024 · Reviews Putting power and money at the heart of history again: Catherine Comyn’s The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa Max Harris The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa opens up space for further work on Māori economies and economic resistance, on possible reparative obligations of private sector financial institutions and agents in New Zealand, and on how the New Zealand state in recent centuries has enabled a particular colonial and economic order.