Mr. Svankmajer was born in 1934, and was 13 when Czechoslovakia came under Communist rule. He studied theater directing and puppeteering, and worked at the Semafor playhouse in Prague before joining the Laterna Magika, an experimental company sometimes called the world’s first multimedia theater. In the 1960s, he joined the Czech Surrealist Group and applied its principles to his art.

“The audiences were leaving my productions disgusted,” he said, because they couldn’t understand the avant-garde aesthetics.

“That was when I realized that cinema is like a kind of time capsule, like a can where you can preserve a stage production and wait for the viewer,” he said. “I decided to focus on using the language of cinema.”

But making films in the Czech studio system meant that Mr. Svankmajer had to submit his proposals for approval, then submit the scripts, then the final film, and the censors could always reject the film at any stage.

In 1974, after his film “Leonardo’s Diary” was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, his work was condemned by a pro-government newspaper. The movie he was working on at the time, “Castle of Otranto,” came under greater scrutiny, and censors demanded he make many changes. Mr. Svankmajer refused and as a result was banned from filmmaking. He could not finish his movie until 1979 when the prohibition was lifted.

“I never was a political artist,” Mr. Svankmajer said “but I am an engaged artist, because Surrealism was always an engaged art. The idea of Surrealism is to change the world — that’s Marx — and to transform life — that’s Rimbaud,” he added, referring to the 19th century French poet.