The imagination of touch: surrealist tactility in the films of Jan Švankmajer

Abstract

This article is a theoretical examination of tactility in the Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Sˇ vankmajer’s film Down to the Cellar (1983). Sˇ vankmajer’s deployment of tactile images in a surrealist context shows the need for a discussion of the imagination’s role in the embodied film experience. Departing from Laura Marks’s The Skin of the Film, this article seeks to explore the surrealist embodied imagination through surrealist poetics of analogy, as defined by Andre´ Breton, and the link between these and Walter Benjamin’s writings on mimesis. Finally, the film is viewed from the perspective of Gaston Bachelard’s ideas of ‘‘the imagination of matter,’’ where matter is seen as a highly potent stimulant for the imagination. Bachelard’s notion of the imagination’s multisensory properties further lends credence to Sˇ vankmajer’s aims to liberate the imagination of the spectator through