Dusan Marek

Puppets in a surreal location—a business where eating, drinking and card playing take place. Tate Modern’s 2022 ‘Surrealism Without Borders’ exhibition features the film.

An animated film using abstract cutouts, symbolising life, reproduction, growth and destruction from creation to the end of the world in an explosion, then the beginning of a new cycle.

An animated film of children’s paintings that evokes the syncretistic sensibility of childhood and is a curious dialogue between this and a surrealist sensibility... The children’s drawings, which have powerful art brut qualities, were supplied by a friend, the printmaker Udo Sellbach, who was teaching art at St. Peter’s College in Adelaide, and Marek combined them with his own artwork, chiefly the backgrounds.

When a scientist finds a cocoon a woman emerges from it. She is being chased by two faceless monsters who are collecting specimens for a museum.

Combining animation with live action this is one of the few truly surreal works to emerge in the Australian cinema, an intensely personal reflection, by Czech artist Dusan Marek, on the importance of maintaining an inner freedom. Marek is the film's solitary character – the artist and his alter-ego who wears a de Chirico-like mask. The spare commentary poetically alludes to the artist's conflict with his subconscious culminating in liberation. The images are assembled in a manner akin to music. Marek hoped that this would allow viewers to maintain contact with their imaginations.

Stop-motion animations inspired by the Surrealist Movement.

Puppets in a surreal location—a business where eating, drinking and card playing take place. Tate Modern’s 2022 ‘Surrealism Without Borders’ exhibition features the film.

An animated film using abstract cutouts, symbolising life, reproduction, growth and destruction from creation to the end of the world in an explosion, then the beginning of a new cycle.

An animated film of children’s paintings that evokes the syncretistic sensibility of childhood and is a curious dialogue between this and a surrealist sensibility... The children’s drawings, which have powerful art brut qualities, were supplied by a friend, the printmaker Udo Sellbach, who was teaching art at St. Peter’s College in Adelaide, and Marek combined them with his own artwork, chiefly the backgrounds.

When a scientist finds a cocoon a woman emerges from it. She is being chased by two faceless monsters who are collecting specimens for a museum.

When a scientist finds a cocoon a woman emerges from it. She is being chased by two faceless monsters who are collecting specimens for a museum.

Combining animation with live action this is one of the few truly surreal works to emerge in the Australian cinema, an intensely personal reflection, by Czech artist Dusan Marek, on the importance of maintaining an inner freedom. Marek is the film's solitary character – the artist and his alter-ego who wears a de Chirico-like mask. The spare commentary poetically alludes to the artist's conflict with his subconscious culminating in liberation. The images are assembled in a manner akin to music. Marek hoped that this would allow viewers to maintain contact with their imaginations.

Stop-motion animations inspired by the Surrealist Movement.