Prior to and throughout his career as a director, Svankmajer has maintained interests in collage, sculpture and the dramatic arts. When he turned to cinema in the early 1960's, he used Prague's experimental and marionette theatres as sources for his early work. His first film, The Last Trick (1964), uses life-size marionettes to depict the battle between rival magicians for an audience's affection. Each one performs increasingly impossible tricks which must have required all of Svankmajer's precocious ability as an animator to capture on film. Punch And Judy (1966) focuses on the smaller puppet stage. Punch and Harlequin conduct a bloodthirsty feud over Punch's pet guinea pig using infernal machines and a selection of woodworking tools in their attempts to polish each other off. Both The Last Trick and Punch And Judy are blackly comic and, in their use of marionettes, point to the extensive use of puppetry in Faust (1994).

Unsurprisingly, Czechoslovakia's repressive Communist regime had an influence on Svankmajer's early films. Fantasia In G Minor (1965), his most minimal work, contrasts the beauty of Bach's music with images of walls, locked doors, decay and degradation. The Flat (1968), made in the year of the Prague Spring and its brutal suppression, is a nightmarish Kafkaesque vision in which a young man is trapped without hope of release in a dilapidated room. The symbolism is obvious but effective nonetheless, Svankmajer using startling special effects photography to convey his prisoner's desperate attempts at escape.

Svankmajer joined the Czech Surrealist group in 1970. His films have always had a dreamlike quality but, as his work of the early 1970's shows, his collaboration with like-minded colleagues gave fresh impetus to his pursuit of the absurd. The Ossuary (1970) is a classic surrealist treatment of a bizarre found object. Svankmajer silently captures every angle of the crypt in East Bohemia's Sedlec Church, containing sculptures, coats of arms and even a chandelier made from the bones of plague victims displaced from its graveyard. Jabberwocky (1970), a version of Lewis Carroll's absurb poem, is Svankmajer's first tribute to the author claimed by the Surrealist movement as one of its forefathers. It is reminiscent of his later Alice in its remarkable, sometimes disturbing, use of animation to capture the power of the imagination. The action is set in a doll's house mock-up of a Victorian nursery. Cardboard figurines dance, china dolls consume each other, armies of tin soldiers are pummelled to dust by a porcelain baby whilst a large black cat weaves a pathway of destruction through the surrounding chaos. Jabberwocky celebrates childhood, but with its anarchic and violent imagery, it is no sugared idyll.

Unfortunately, Leonardo's Diary (1972) - which contrasted excerpts from the artist's humanist notebooks with unedifying scenes of Czech life under communism in a style reminiscent of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam - was a film too far for the Czech regime. An enforced absence from the cinema followed for some years. When Svankmajer was allowed to resume his career during the late 1970's and the 1980's, he made politically uncontroversial versions of The Castle Of Otranto, a Gothic classic, and of two of Edgar Allen Poe's best known tales, The Fall Of The House Of Usher and The Pit And The Pendulum. Surprisingly, however, he also found license to produce Dimensions Of Dialogue (1982) and Virile Games (1988), both bitter commentaries on the collapse of social relations brought about in his country by the repressive political system.

In Dimensions of Dialogue, conversing heads cannibalise each other (these being comprised of vegetables, fruit and kitchen utensils in a tribute to mannerist painter, Archimbaldo), whilst warring figures spit objects out at each other in an ultimately destructive attempt to find common ground. In Virile Games, one of Svankmajer's funniest works, a football match is used as an allegory for an increasingly violent society. Two football teams use saucepan lids, scissors, taps and corkscrews to assault the opposition, scoring goals through the demise of their opponents as a rapturous audience cheers them on. Both Dimensions and Virile Games display Svankmajer's developing mastery of clay modeling animation, which he used so effectively in Faust.

In his final short, The Demise Of Stalinism In Bohemia (1990), Svankmajer has the last laugh over the recently overthrown regime. He uses footage, model animation and montage to tell the story of Communism in Czechoslovakia from the Second World War. A lumbering statue of Stalin gives birth from its head to a succession of Czech puppet leaders, Svankmajer's savage wit destroying any pretence of their dignity or independence of action. As with all his work of the preceding 26 years, it's a unique vision, the product of a mature and experienced director with an unrelenting grasp of the joys of imagination and fantasy left behind by others in childhood.

Alistair Woolley