Dimensions of Dialogue (1983) begins with two faces shaped out of random accoutrements such as decaying fruits and vegetables, kitchen equipment and utensils etc. The two faces move towards each other and clash in a haphazard mishmash of objects—face shapes are completely destroyed as kitchen scissors cut into apples, peelers peel vegetables, mashers mash into sugar cubes, forks, knives, graters cause havoc and destruction before everything is regurgitated into two identical faces that yet again go through the same process of destruction and reconstruction. This is the first segment of the film, titled “Objective Dialogue”. Accompanied by the sound of metal working through the food, it is not an easy watch—the haptic quality of the image causes bodily discomfort to the viewer, at times, even making the food look gross and disgusting. Food and consumption play important roles for Surrealists, appearing in many Surrealist works, such as Salvador Dalí’s Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933). For Švankmajer, this common Surrealist trope is elevated to the level of the fetishistic sacred. Michael Richardson understands the act of eating in Švankmajer’s films as an act of primary communication with the world, the “incorporation of dead matter into the living being” that links “the sexual act with death” where eating and creating are both ultimately destructive.[i] I argue that food and consumption in Dimensions of Dialogue reveal the interest of the Communist faction of Surrealism’s interest in “base materialism”—the disgusting, gross, rotting food shows a Surrealist interest in the concrete and the material as a means of accessing the ephemeral and transitory, where the animation of inanimate objects become the repositories of living memory and reveal cinema’s haptic and bodily hold over its audience.
Jan Švankmajer was a Czechoslovakian Surrealist filmmaker best known for his feature length stop-motion film, Alice (1988), as well as numerous short films. In his animation, the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate are constantly transgressed through the use of theatre puppets and haptic imagery, childhood fears and cruelty are constantly reanimated and creation and destruction become dialectical processes. A longtime member of the Czechoslovakian Surrealist Party, the influence of the movement on his work is undeniable. His 1983 stop-motion animation, Dimensions of Dialogue, deals heavily with such Surrealist themes and concerns such as the confusion between life and the inanimate and the irrational juxtaposition of objects towards triggering bodily sensations such as discomfort and disgust.
The Communist faction of Surrealism, represented by the founders of the journal Documents, Georges Henri-Riviere and Georges Bataille, arising in opposition to Andre Breton’s specific branch of Surrealism and influenced by ethnography, turned to a “base materialism” to fulfill their Surrealist ideals. Such materialism aimed at destabilizing all foundations and disrupting the opposition of the high and low, value driven hierarchies and concepts of aesthetic versus repulsive, gross or disgusting towards the establishment of an active base matter that allows for access to higher forms of consciousness. While not a self-proclaimed Communist, much can be understood of Svankamjer’s work from the concept of base materialism. Jennifer Wild identifies a specific branch of Surrealist cinema, exemplified by the films of Jean Vigo, that moves away from the abstraction of the avant-garde towards a form of base materialism, one that she labels as “concrete aesthetics”.[ii] Inspired by ethnography and Russian socialist film realism, it aimed at rendering “concrete” the world and man’s place in it, through material conditions that reveal social and political relations. James Cahill describes the Surrealist-scientific films of Jean Painleve as “carnivorous cinema”— which “directly implicate their audiences in an economy of vampiric consumption and contagion and threaten to sink their teeth into us.”[iii] In Švankmajer’s films, including Dimensions of Dialogue, the “base materialism” of Surrealism and its “concrete aesthetics” can help us make sense of the violence, the repulsive and the gross aspects of the film. It is a film that “sink their teeth into us”, directly implicating their viewers in the economy of gross consumption, destruction and regurgitation.
The second act to this film is no less “carnivorous” in its appetite, invoking in the viewer a sense of being touched by the image. This sense of haptic sensorium is invoked by the very human fingerprints of the animator on the dead clay surface of the models of human faces that undergo constant reconstruction, invoking a sense of Uncanny as signs of life co-mingle with the lifeless. In the second act, as two clay figures sit facing each other, the presence of the “hand of the animator” is felt in the fingerprints that shape the clay, a sense of an all-encompassing, omniscient presence exerting control over the otherwise dead landscape of objects that ultimately claws away at the clay figures to destruction. If ever there was a film that gestured towards a sur-real or beyond the real through a vampiric grasp on its viewers, it would have to be Dimensions of Dialogue.
Figure 1. A still from Dimensions of Dialogue.
In the third act, conceptions of “use-value” for objects are further challenged through the “dialogue” between the two clay heads—at first smoothly as one head spits out a random object (shoe, toothbrush, bread) and the other produces the corresponding item (toothpaste, shoe-lace). However, as the scene progresses chaos ensues, the heads spitting out mismatching items that leads to destruction and mess. In Dimensions of Dialogue, the “dialogue” speaks through everyday objects about the carnivorous appetite of the cinematic image that exerts bodily, sensorial control in triggering repulsion, disgust and terror in its viewers.
[i] Michael Richardson, “Jan Švankmajer and the Life of Objects,” in Surrealism and Cinema (Berg, 2006):121-134, 126.
[ii] Jennifer Wild. “For a Concrete Aesthetics: Against Avant-Garde Film c. 1930.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 58, no. 1–2 (2017): 67–78. https://doi.org/10.13110/framework.58.1-2.0067.
[iii] James Cahill, The Strange Worlds of Jean Painleve, 155-167, 161.
Srijita Banerjee is a PhD Candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Currently, she is writing a dissertation on the “Cinema of Collection”. Her upcoming publications include an essay on Jodie Mack in Feminist Media Histories and a book chapter on Harry Smith in the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Animation Studies.