Svankmajer - "Conspirators of Pleasure"

[Kasper Lauritzen]

I might have to use the term 'masterpiece' here. I love Svankmajer, just saw his "Conspirators of Pleasure" and already it's closing in on my top 20 of films (not sure yet).

I've seen films by Melies, Richter, Bunuel, Fellini, Jodorowsky, other Czech directors and so on but - bottomline - I only regard two films as truly surrealist: "The Holy Mountain" and now "Conspirators of Pleasure".

Loving Svankmajer's short films, it's strange that it isn't till now that I've moved into his features (saw "Alice" long time ago, then yesterday I saw "Faust" and today this). "Conspirators" is strange because in terms of effects in contains very little of what Svankmajer is known for - hardly any animation, only a couple of puppets, few 'tricks', etc., and yet it is his strongest expression of surrealism. I'll try to outline why without spoiling too much of this brilliant film.

The 'story' is simple: The film jumps between 6 or 7 people each obsessed with a pleasure. We see them prepare their 'pleasure', execute it and "move on" afterwards. It's basically the same structure as a short film called "Desire Management" that I saw some time ago (available here: https://vimeo.com/9785498 ).

It differs from "Desire Management" in that it is obviously longer but also because Svankmajer uses what I would call the 'Melies effect' - that is instead of using a long time to build up a magic trick with one pledge and one prestige, we are overwhelmed by a sequence of magic tricks, shifting constantly and aiming to surprise us.

This is true to "Conspirators" but this technique goes further. Like "Desire Management" the characters are strangely closed to us. We observe them from the outside, getting just a hunch of their background, never knowing what motivates them, what their thoughts are, what their goal is - the only fixed point is their desire and our only possible identification is for the viewer to believe in this (the same goes for his main character in "Faust" but here the effect hurts the film, IMO).

So by attacking both our character identification/empathy and our lust for logic and control (I regard our ability to predict actions as a kind of control), Svankmajer is playing entirely in the irrational and the effect is often hilariously comic. So far so good.

But I think there is yet another important point to make about this film, namely its tactility. While other surreal films have reached the before-mentioned "freedom of irrationality", Svankmajer is one of the few who offers us an alternative.

Not only has he invited us to watch the film purely as a viewer, he's also making a tactile universe for the viewer to experience, and this is what really makes him unique.

If Jodorowsky is Jungian, Svankmajer is certainly Freudian. But the point he is making is far more complex than just "getting into our inner animal that has been repressed by culture". Through the emphasized tactility of objects and through what could easily be called the characters' fetishism of objects, Svankmajer is getting us back 'in touch with the world'. His objects are not ideas, they are not dream symbols, they are not even signs. They are present, detached from transcendence, and in themselves unique. The word "furs" can never replace the actual furs, and thus seeing this film is a condition for understanding it.

Of course, there's a layer of irony on top of this because the film media is optical, not tactile - to call a film tactile is indeed synaesthetic. But somehow this is also true to the characters. It's striking how their lust for sexual pleasure is displaced into a 'masturbatoric' and lonely world that ironically seems out of touch with reality.

I've hereby outlined by interpretation of the film, and the point is that I link all these thoughts with what can be read in Andre Breton's manifesto of surrealism. I wont go into detail about Breton's theories, but I think it's important to emphasize works that are actually surrealist in philosophy and not just in style.

I think it's my host month soon and I'm definitely nominating Svankmajer ;-)

Kasper

[Thorkell A. Ottarsson]

Sounds Great Kasper!  :)