Giants, fairies, magicians, ghosts, dragons, and monsters of all kinds… Here’s what your Cinémathèque has in store this summer! Since Méliès, filmmakers have embraced the fanstastic potential of cinema, creating infinite phantasmagorias and extraordinary spectacles where the unreal becomes real. Step into a world of fantasy and boundless imagination: whatever your generation, the monsters and wonders that once filled your childhood dreams are back this summer 2025!
Winner of the Grand Prix, 1989 Annecy Festival
Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer directs this surprising adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic, applying his ideas on tactilism, a form of expression invented in the early 1920s by Marinetti and the Italian Futurists. Here, Švankmajer focuses on creating images that evoke tactile sensations in the viewer: furs, nails, blades and slimy or oily materials fill the screen, while rusty metals, sawdust and various kinds of dirt appear one after the other, sometimes provoking fear, sometimes disgust. Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is thus freed from any romantic vision to become a nightmarish otherworld, bringing out all sorts of anxieties.
Jan Švankmajer
Jan Švankmajer is a Czech film director, animator, writer, playwright and artist. He draws and makes free graphics, collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages. In the early 1960s, he explored informel, which later became an important part of the visual form of his animated films. He is a leading representative of late Czech surrealism. In his film work, Švankmajer created an unmistakable and quite specific style, determined primarily by a compulsively unorthodox combination of externally disparate elements. The anti-artistic nature of this process, based on collage or assemblage, functions as a meaning-making factor. The author himself claims that the intersubjective communication between him and the viewer works only through evoked associations, and his films fulfil their subversive mission only when, even in the most fantastic moments, they look like a record of reality. Some of the works he created together with his wife Eva Švankmajerová include Alice (1988), Faust (1994), and Little Otik (2000).
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Valérie et les autres : fantastique au féminin
Among August’s screenings, some films explore the fantastic through dreamlike and poetic lenses, drawing it from the ambiguous realms of sensuality and fantasy. This is especially true of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, a gem of the Czech New Wave, where we enter the surreal world of a young girl who has just had her first period and suddenly finds herself surrounded by relatives turned into vampires.
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