Video & On Demand - Lunacy DVD & Download

The film is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allen Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade.

In nineteenth-century France (albeit one full of deliberate anachronisms) a young man, Jean Berlot, is plagued by nightmares in which he is dragged off to a madhouse. On the journey back from his mother’s funeral he is invited by a Marquis he meets at lunch to spend the night in his castle. There Berlot witnesses  a blasphemous orgy and a ‘therapeutic’ funeral. Berlot tries to flee but the Marquis insists on helping him conquer his fears and takes his guest to a nearby lunatic asylum where the patients have complete freedom and the staff are locked up behind bars. Described by Svankmajer as a “philosophical horror film,” Lunacy combines live action and stop-motion, sex and violence, grand guignol terror and gallows humour, and a lot of animated meat.

Special Features:

• ‘making of’ documentary
• photo galleries and more

After studying at the Institute of Industrial Arts and the Marionette Faculty of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s, Jan Švankmajer, now 77, started working as a theatre director, chiefly in association with the Theatre of Masks and the Black Theatre. He first experimented with film-making after becoming involved with the mixed-media productions of Prague's Lanterna Magika Theatre.

He began making short films in 1964 (released as a definitive anthology by the BFI), and continued working in the same medium for over twenty years, when he finally achieved his long-held ambition to make the extraordinary and much loved feature film based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (Alice, 1988). His subsequent acclaimed features include Faust, Conspirators of Pleasure, Little Otik and Lunacy.

He has also exhibited drawings, collages and 'tactile sculptures', many of which were produced in the mid-1970s, when he was temporarily banned from film-making by the Czech authorities. He has been a member of the Prague Surrealist Group since 1969.

1964 -- The Last Trick

1965 -- J.S.Bach - Fantasy in G Minor

1965 -- A Game with Stones

1966 -- Punch and Judy

1966 -- Et Cetera

1967 -- Historia Naturae

1968 -- The Garden

1968 -- The Flat

1969 -- Picnic with Weismann

1969 -- A Quiet Week in the House

1970 -- The Ossuary

1970 -- Don Juan

1971 -- Jabberwocky

1972 -- Leonardo's Diary

1973 - 9 -- The Castle of Otranto

1980 -- The Fall of the House of Usher

1982 -- Dimensions of Dialogue

1982 -- Down to the Cellar

1983 -- The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope

1987 -- Alice (FEATURE film)

1988 -- Virile Games

1988 -- Another Kind of Love

1989 -- Meat Love

1989 -- Darkness-Light-Darkness

1989 -- Flora

1990 -- The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia

1992 -- Food

1994 -- Faust (feature film)

1996 -- Conspirators of Pleasure (feature film)

2000 -- Otesánek (Little Otik) (feature film)

2005 -- Lunacy (feature film)

2010 – Surviving Life (feature film)