Alexander Alexeieff & Claire Parker. John & Faith Hubley. John Halas & Joy Batchelor. Nag & Gisèle Ansorge. Jan & Eva Svankmajer. In the history of animation as a fine art, there are a handful of couples who have achieved the marriage of their lives, love and art.

One of the most prolific and artistically experimental of these partnerships is that of Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer and painter/sculptor Eva Svankmajerová. Independently and together, the two artists have worked in nearly every medium imaginable: animation and live-action film, sculpture, collage, printmaking, painting and poetry. "Although they choose different approaches, both Jan and Eva Svankmajer seem to have been following the same goal on various levels and planes of expression," observes Frantisek Dryje in his essay in the new book about the Svankmajers' creative work, Anima Animus Animation: Between Film and Free Expression from Prague-based Slovart Publishers. This sturdy volume is the closest thing to a "coffee table book" ever published about either artist. The publication accompanies current exhibitions of the Svankmajers' work throughout their country, including the Czech Gallery of Modern Art, the Regional Gallery of Vysocina, and the East Bohemian Gallery, Pardubice. Itself an exhibition within a book, the pictorially rich Anima Animus Animation is an excellent visual companion to Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Svankmajer, a collection of analytical texts edited by Peter Hames and published by Greenwood Press in 1995.

A Gallery in a Book
More than 100 luscious, full color prints and close to 200 more black and white illustrations depict selections from the Svankmajers' extensive body of work. Prints of paintings, machines, tactile objects, films, pottery, puppets and collages are mixed with poems, interviews, screenplays, games, diaries, texts and dreams. The book is divided into ten loosely-interpreted "chapters," each beginning with a brief statement on the themes commonly explored in their work: Anima, Animus, Animation; The Structures of the Beginning; Eros and Thanatos; Historia Naturae; Touch and Gesture; Manipulation and the Puppet; Alchemy and Magic; Games and Dreams; the Arcimboldo Principle and The Increased Difficulty of Communication. The back of the book contains 12 pages of biographies, a joint filmography, and bibliographies of exhibitions, catalogs and texts written on both artists.

Highlights
Chapter I (Anima, Animus, Animation) contains prints of animated objects and collages; sequentially arranged pieces of art which are not filmed, but which illustrate small progressive or repeated movements. Five ceramic vases give birth to a cup in "Birth," a metal spoon feeds lumps of clay to itself in "Autocannibalism," and abstract figures alternate body parts in "Excuse me, but you have valuable tubes inside you."

In Chapter VII (Alchemy and Magic), a selection of diary entries written by Jan Svankmajer in 1993, describe the ominous ill fortune that befell the cast and crew of the film Faust during and after its production (the film's star, Petr Cepek, mysteriously died shortly afterwards). After being asked by a journalist what he thought of the re-release of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Svankmajer also writes, "Walt Disney is one of the leading destroyers of European culture. Perhaps most significant, because he destroys it in utero-in children's minds."

In Chapter IX (The Arcimboldo Principle), we see a collection of work inspired by the 16th century Mannerist artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose composite-head paintings inspired 2-D works and films such as Dimensions of Dialogue, which won Svankmajer the grand prize at Annecy in 1982.

In Chapter X (The Increased Difficulty of Communication), we see iconographic studies, such as rebus paintings by Eva Svankmajerová which use images and hands in sign language poses to depict visual riddles for the viewer to decipher.