A Game with Stones, a short animated film by Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer, will be featured in The Infra-ordinary, a curated shorts program presented as part of the ninth Rockaway Film Festival. The screening will take place at Arverne Cinema Inside and is supported in part by Czech Center New York.
TICKETSGuest-curated by American artist and writer Jenny Odell, the program turns its attention to everyday objects and the hidden lives they may contain. Inspired by French writer Georges Perec’s invitation to question even the most ordinary things around us, the selected films move between the magical promise of consumer products and the troubling banality of objects destined to become waste.
Švankmajer’s nine-minute A Game with Stones, made in 1965, is an early example of his distinctive approach to object animation. Stones come to life, arrange themselves into shifting patterns, and move through a rhythmic mechanism in which playfulness gradually gives way to destruction. The film anticipates Švankmajer’s lifelong fascination with the physical presence of objects, the power of the imagination, and the unseen forces that disrupt the logic of everyday life.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.
