Dimensions of Dialogue: Meditations on Communication and Love

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It is human nature to communicate with one another and to love. Both are executed in various ways, often through touch and words. These pillars of humanity can bring us closer together, allowing a bond to form. But what happens when our ability to communicate and to love is disrupted? When is a collision consistently occurring, no matter what words are said and what acts are performed? In his 1982 animated short film, Czechoslovakian filmmaker Jan Švankmajer explores the love at the beginning of three different relationships and their ultimate ruination. Švankmajer utilizes a surrealist lens to examine this breakdown, engaging with the human psychology of love and employing absurd and, at times, disturbing imagery to evoke an emotional response.

The film, split into three sections, begins with “Eternal Conversation” (Dialog Věcný), in which viewers encounter three figures constructed of various food, office, and kitchen items greatly inspired by 16^th-century Italian painter Guiseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits. This section shows the figures continuously devouring and regurgitating one another until all that remains are identical clay busts. Film critics have examined this section as a political and social commentary on society’s attempts to eliminate uniqueness from its members, resulting in forced conformity. Individuality is, in theory, celebrated and encouraged, yet when someone does display a distinctive personality that opposes this fixed idea of what is acceptable in society, they are sometimes spurned.

The destruction of the individual items poses the question of whether the figures at the beginning are meant to represent society as a machine and us as members of society. Viewing the film through that lens, I would opine that Švankmajer may be pointing to how we have consciously contributed to the violence of conformity. Therefore, we could arrive at the reasoning that we have been the machine that sustains this brutality. It can also be argued that the assaults we inflict on one another occur because we fail to communicate due to our metamorphosis into machines. Yes, machines can successfully communicate, as we have witnessed with the rise of AI, but they cannot feel emotions. The ability to simply feel sets us apart from the metal parts constructed to make machines and emulate humans. Our capacity to feel also sets us apart from one another, but when we are forced into conforming, as Švankmajer suggests, we can no longer emphasize or converse.

In the film’s second section, “Passionate Discourse” (Dialog Vášnivý), Švankmajer presents two clay figures meant to symbolize a couple in a relationship. This segment illustrates the sensuality and love between two people and the haste with which that connection can deteriorate, leading to hate and violence. The depiction of the couple, as in the previous section, portrays faulty lines of communication. As critic Alexandria Daniels writes, communication is vital to forming and strengthening our connections and sharing our wants, needs, and desires. Švankmajer highlights how an absence of communication coupled with passion leads to a disruption, which, in the film, is represented by a literal tearing of the figures. The choreography the clay figures perform as they break apart or morph into and consume one another expresses the infatuation experienced in love. In their movements at the start, the figures replicate the various ways communication can be untroubled and euphoric as they come together for an intimate encounter, their clay bodies fluidly melting into each other. Yet, at the end of this moment, when the two figures return to their original form, they discover a clump of clay that seemingly doesn’t belong to either of them, yet they both are unwilling to accept or claim it. Many critics have interpreted the lump as a representation of the creation of a child. Through their rejection of the mass, I would opine that this moment is where a lack of understanding and an inability to communicate arises, resulting in a grotesque display of the two figures violently melding into one. Through this piece, Švankmajer details the trajectory of a relationship; how it can go from adoration to detestation when there is a mutual refusal to listen.  

In the third and final segment, “Exhaustive Discussion” (Dialog Vyčerpávající), the viewer is confronted with an absurd and violent depiction of the characters’ incapacity to communicate. The segment features two clay heads that resemble bald men. The heads alternate in offering each other objects that emerge from their mouth and sit on their tongues, like toothpaste, a toothbrush, a pencil, and a pencil sharpener, signaling a cooperative and symbiotic relationship or, alternately, the ability to communicate. Over time, the communication breaks down, and they begin offering one another items that don’t belong together, ultimately destroying the other. The busts present a toothbrush and pencil sharpener to each other, and as they try to make them work together, the sharpener ruins the toothbrush, shaving the bristles off. This collision of incompatible items is a meditation on the fractured way we communicate and our continued attempts to mend that splintering. The section's title also points to never-ending efforts to converse despite the abrasion that occurs and the resulting exhaustion we experience.

The film has its moments of comedy but ultimately employs a macabre and violent aesthetic to examine how we communicate our love. But, more importantly, Švankmajer ruminates on the breakdown of love and communication through the destruction of the figures. Furthermore, the film leads the viewer to wonder what it says about us as a society if we are constantly pushing against one another. The film is particularly salient for our time, given our miscommunications aided by social media and technology. How do we break through these barriers, which can be read as our differences, and reclaim love and communication not guided by hatred?

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