Eva Švankmajerová, A Female Film Poster Design Icon
“Behind every great man stands a great woman.” —Proverb
Eva Švankmajerová was born after the outbreak of World War II in a small town in central Bohemia. Although she graduated from the Department of Puppetry at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, her main interest was the medium of painting, a medium that she used in her film poster designs, in which she developed a unique Surrealist style informed by her love of folk art. She was a ceramicist, graphic designer, artist, poet, and film-maker.
In 1968, after the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia, she and her family left the country, but returned after less than a year in exile in Vienna. From there, she met and married to the surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, with whom she collaborated on such films as “Alice,” “Faust,” and “Conspirators of Pleasure”. She was Jan's art director, designer, and inspiration. Her art production is incredibly eccentric and its influence is in almost all of his films. Her style is a very unique, naïve style and it is very recognizable. She designed all of the posters for his films, starting with “Alice” in 1988. She also designed posters for other directors, such as Vera Chytilová’s modern day Adam and Eve allegory “Fruit of Paradise” (1970).
Švankmajerová’s poster work is strangely distinctive: a mixture of dream-like visuals hinting at the erotic and the grotesque, a rich color palette and unique hand-lettering. On many of her posters, every line of text is hand-painted. Many of her poster designs are instantly recognizable because of her unique style. In fact, her poster designs could not be reproduced in English because the hand-lettered Czech titles are a part of the design work.
Sadly, this amazing artist passed away in 2005 after a long battle with breast cancer, but her legacy lives on and continues to inspire female designers. She was incredibly obscure in the film poster design canon until her work was discovered and recognized in the United States years after her passing.
