In Švankmajer’s career, there were three periods of exploration of the “touching”:
The first period was 1964-1972, during which Švankmajer mainly created short animation films, and he collected a wide range of objects for use in his animation work, with the intention of finding the “touch” of neglected objects.
The second period was 1973-1980, the seven years during which Švankmajer was banned from making films by the Czech authorities.During this period, Švankmajer and his colleagues in the Surrealist group focused on “tactile experiments”and wrote Touching and Imagining：An Introduction to Tactile Art
The third period is from 1981 to the present, with The Fall of the House of Usher, published in 1981. It is a book in which Švankmajer uses film to create a “tactile” image.
In the late 1980s, Švankmajer began to turn to animated feature films, systematically using the “Tactile Sensation” as an important means of expressing objects and emotions in film.
Jabberwocky is endowed with a large number of vintage objects and toys.
Švankmajer’s early animated shorts relied more on individual consciousness in search of tactile perception, which has been abandoned by mainstream animation, and which is projected onto the film through the director’s subjective emotional judgement, “representing a subject-object relationship between man and his environment with intentionality and relevance”.
Therefore, it is not difficult to find that the objects represented in Švankmajer’s animation works of this period were usually small, easily accessible, inanimate objects that could be played with,to which the director’s will and emotions could easily override and attach themselves.
It could be argued that Švankmajer’s film-making at this stage was more akin to a social practice in search of a general sense of touch.
[1] Lu Kang. How Films Stimulate Audience’s Emotions–A Review of Carl Plantinga’s Cognitive-Perceptual Theory[J]. Journal of Beijing Film Academy,2020(06):12-21.