Week 2 (14th July 2017): Food (Brief comment)

                                                         Jan Svankmajer's Food (1992)
14th July 2017


Soo...What this film is about is that after eating breakfast, a man is transformed into an elaborate dumb-waiter-style breakfast dispenser and the same fate befalls the man who obtains breakfast from him.During lunch ,After failing to catch the waiter’s eye, two would-be diners end up eating everything within reach.And for dinner,well...Portraits of various meals made up of human organs.Jan Svankmajer's final short film is a shocker, a return to an allegory he conceived of in the 1970s but which was unproducable under the Communist system. On one level, that's odd: every point made in Food could be spun as anti-capitalist. But under a system which famously banned him from directing for making irreverent musical choices, it's hard to really have a discussion over the political nuance of someone eating their own hand.


How different would this have been if it could have been made in the 1970s? I think it would have been less disturbing; the smoothness of Švankmajer's technique now allows him to seamlessly switch between real humans and plasticine models, which makes the violence more shocking than it is in gorier, fully animated shorts like Darkness-Light-Darkness or The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. Other than his increased technical confidence, the only other sign that this was made in the '90s is 'Lunch', which proves that, by 1993, the floppy centre-parted indie-boy haircut pioneered by Brett Anderson had made it into Prague. Communism could never stand up to such decadent pleasures.

I've said it before,and I'll say it again.Jan Svankmajer has done it again and provided us with another and unfortunately his last short film.All of his films have attracted my interests towards Surrealism.His films will always be recommended to people I know whether they like Surrealism or not.Either way,these are films that are needed to be watched whether you can or can't handle the eerie and strange scenes or noises but with deep and dark meaningful stories behind them.