A retrospective appreciation of Jan Švankmajer’s surreal stop-motion film “Food” from 1992.
From the luscious pies and steaks in Tom & Jerry to the wholesome sensuality of Studio Ghibli’s food scenes there is a wealth of aesthetic variation and tradition on the topic of food in animation. The Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934) is a master of stop-motion surrealism and is perhaps best known for his dark and weird feature film “Alice” from 1988. Švankmajer’s work was deeply critical of the Communist regime and Eastern Bloc rule and he was frequently censored and banned from filming between 1972 and 1979, working instead as a stage and production designer and ceramicist with his wife Eva instead.
In 1992 Švankmajer released a short, 17-minute film called “Jídlo” (Czech for “Food”) that he reportedly conceived in the 1970s. “Food” is a Kafkaesque, allegorical crossover between banality and greed tying together avarice, hunger, slight, consumption, lack of choice and machinations of the “system” across a dining table.
“Food is perhaps the most apt symbol of our civilization because, in its insatiable aggression, our civilization consumes everything around us: nature, animals, whole ethnic groups, cultures… everything gets digested in its utilitarian maw only to be excreted as money – the excrement of our times.” said Jan and Eva Švankmajer in the catalogue text to their 2004 exhibition “Jídlo” in Prague.
“Everything gets digested in [food’s] utilitarian maw only to be excreted as money – the excrement of our times.”
Jan and Eva Švankmajer
Beyond the allegory, from his own account in that same text, Švankmajer also had a traumatic childhood relationship to food: “When I was six I was so skinny that my Mum had to push me around in a wheelchair. Because of my morbid gauntness I wasn’t even accepted to school. I was fed ferriferous wine, fish oil (apparently to stimulate appetite). They sent me to feeding camps, where we were given a packet of sweets for every extra kilo we managed to put on in one week.”
“Jídlo” the film has three scenes: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. In Breakfast, a middle-aged man struggles to work out how to extract a meal from his automaton table companion. Instructions are read, the simple canteen meal progresses and then the diner becomes the automaton and a new diner from an endless queue takes his place. It echoes the fear and the tedium of “man” being replaced by “the machine” and yet reliant upon it for sustenance. This film may be thirty years old but with the rise of AI, humankind’s fear of its own technology is as strong now as it ever was.
Over Lunch, a smartly dressed businessman in a grey suit and a poorer-looking younger man, both share a table. Both desperately try and fail to attract the attention of the waiter and end up consuming what they have on and in front of them for lunch instead, starting with a small vase of flowers on the laid table between them. Staring each other in the eyes as they competitively consume, even as they have nothing it is clear that the “rich” man has more.
Dinner is a black-tie affair and starts with a table loaded with various condiments and side dishes. When the camera angle switches to the main dishes, where one is somehow already expecting some hearty bohemian cuisine, the viewer is disturbed to see various human body parts being garnished for consumption. It’s a gruesome echo of Peter Greenaway’s infamous 1989 arthouse film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” and yet somehow the criticism sits deeper in this less decadent setting. It is a reminder that no matter how much the meal at the table is garnished, the base immorality of what is being consumed cannot be hidden. The end shot of a diner trying to conceal the body part they are about to consume from the camera shows their awareness of the wrongness of what they are doing.
It’s probably best not to watch “Food” on a full stomach if you are a consumer. Shrouded in surrealism and even comedy, this film is a bitter, bitter critique.
“Jídlo” (“Food”) by Jan Švankmajer, 1992, starring: Ludvík Šváb as Eater #1, Bedřich Glaser as Eater #2, Jan Kraus as Eater #3, Pavel Marek as Eater, Josef Fiala as Eater #4, Karel Hamr as Eater #5
