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The Imagination Of Touch: Surrealist Tactility In The Films Of Jan švankmajer (2013)

This article is a theoretical examination of tactility in the Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer's film Down to the Cellar (1983). Švankmajer's deployment of tactile images in a surrealist context shows the need for a discussion of the

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  The imagination of touch: surrealist tactility inthe films of Jan Sˇvankmajer Kristoffer Noheden* Department of Media Studies, Section for Cinema Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Abstract This article is a theoretical examination of tactility in theCzech surrealist filmmaker Jan Sˇvankmajer’s film Downto the Cellar  (1983). Sˇvankmajer’s deployment of tactileimages in a surrealist context shows the need for adiscussion of the imagination’s role in the embodied filmexperience. Departing from Laura Marks’s The Skin of the Film , this article seeks to explore the surrealist embodiedimagination through surrealist poetics of analogy, asdefined by Andre´ Breton, and the link between these andWalter Benjamin’s writings on mimesis. Finally, the film isviewed from the perspective of Gaston Bachelard’s ideasof ‘‘the imagination of matter,’’ where matter is seen as ahighly potent stimulant for the imagination. Bachelard’snotion of the imagination’s multisensory properties furtherlends credence to Sˇvankmajer’s aims to liberate theimagination of the spectator through images that invoketouch. Kristoffer Noheden is a PhD candi-date in cinema studies at the Depart-ment of Media Studies, StockholmUniversity. In his dissertation, he ex-amines surrealism’s attempts to createa new, re-enchanting myth with a focuson its expressions in surrealist cinema.He is the co-editor, with DanielBrode´n,of the anthology I gra¨ nslandet: Nya perspektiv pa˚ film och modernism (Gidlunds, 2013). He is also the translatorinto Swedish of books by William S. Burroughs, LeonoraCarrington, Max Ernst, and others, and co-runs thesurrealist-oriented publishing house Sphinx. Keywords: Czech film; mimesis; Walter Benjamin; poetics; analogy; materiality; Andre´ Breton; GastonBachelard  In Jan Sˇvankmajer’s 1983 short film Down to theCellar  ( Do pivnice ), a little girl encounters teasinglyfleeing potatoes, a man resting on a bed of coal,and a woman mixing coal dust and eggs into ablack dough. The Czech filmmaker and artistskilfully evokes the tactile properties of thesephenomena as they are played out in the half-illuminated darkness of a cellar in an apartmenthouse. The film fuses reality and the imaginationin a way that recalls both dream logic and a child’sflights of fancy, but it does so with a concretemateriality that not only enhances the film’s tactileproperties but also invites the viewer’s own activeimagination into the equation. This makes Downto the Cellar  a telling example of Sˇvankmajer’s useof tactility, which works as a manifestation of ahighly material form of the surrealist imagination.For the director is not just a renowned animatorbut also arguably one of the most importantfilmmakers to emerge from the surrealist move-ment. 1 This not least takes expression throughhis desire to resuscitate the human capacity foranalogical thinking, where likeness relations con-nect diverse phenomena that the identity principleof scientific thinking keeps apart, and so, fromthe viewpoint of surrealism, has the potential to *Correspondence to: Kristoffer Noheden, Stockholms universitet, Enheten fo¨r filmvetenskap, Box 27062, SE-102 51Stockholm, Sweden. Email: [email protected]  Journal of  AESTHETICS & CULTURE Vol. 5, 2013 # 2013 K. Noheden. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, providedthe srcinal work is properly cited.Citation: Journal of  Aesthetics & Culture , Vol. 5, 2013http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/jac.v5i0.21111 1 (page number not for citation purpose)  poetise and re-enchant a world in the grip of habitand utility.Film theorists like Vivian Sobchack and LauraMarks have established that the film experienceis not merely visual and cerebral but also multi-sensory and embodied, appealing to both touchand taste. 2 A number of Sˇvankmajer’s films evoketouch like few others. Transforming matter, pu-trefying foodstuffs, coarse or sticky surfaces, andthe sudden stop-motion animated life of otherwiseinert objects are some of the elements that com-bine to create tactile sensations through a com-bination of the director’s surrealist inventionswith the viewer’s own sensory experiences. In thisarticle, I discuss how Sˇvankmajer’s tactile filmexperiments call for a partly different approach totactility than what is dominant in contemporaryfilm theory, and how this is connected with thedirector’s emphasis on the imagination and analo-gical thinking. Neither Sobchack nor Marks de-votes much space to the imagination. This meansthat the theoretical understanding of Sˇvankmajer’sfilms in part must differ from the dominant viewof tactility in film, displaying the need for anextended discussion of the role of the imaginationin the embodied film experience.How, then, can we understand these attempts toactivate and stimulate the imagination throughtactile surrealist images? Here, I develop the filmtheoretical views on tactility through a discussionof Laura Marks’s work in The Skin of the Film ,which I negotiate and expand through a meetingwith Sˇvankmajer’s own research into tactility, aswell as surrealist writings on the imagination andits relation to perception. Marks and Sˇvankmajershare the basic conviction that touch has beenneglected in an ocularcentric civilisation. It is,however, mainly her use of Walter Benjamin, andparticularly his work on the mimetic faculty, thatallows her theories to be readjusted and adaptedto illuminate the workings of a surrealist tactilityin moving images. This theoretical investigation of the embodied imagination leads to a discussionof Gaston Bachelard’s writings on the imaginationof matter. I propose that these add a valuable newperspective to the theories of an embodied imagi-nation of touch, concerning both its workings inthe film and its activation of the spectator’s ownassociations. Bachelard’s notion of poetic imagesof matter as stimulants for the reader’s, or in thiscase viewer’s, own imagination not least resoundsclearly with Sˇvankmajer’s findings that touch canliberate the analogical imagination. Throughoutthe article, I use Down to the Cellar  as the mainexample, but I relate many of the questions toother Sˇvankmajer films as well.  JAN SˇVANKMAJER AND SURREALISTTACTILITY  Jan Sˇvankmajer has participated in the Czecho-slovak  * later Czech and Slovak  * surrealist groupsince 1970, and his work in film has much to gainfrom being considered in the light of this collectiveenvironment. A surrealist group was established inPrague already in 1934, but national and personalpolitics alike caused the group to dissolve andreform several times up to the late 1960s. 3 WhenSˇvankmajer joined the group, it had recently in-tensified its activities and entered a phase markedby a new intensity. 4 Soon thereafter, the increas-ingly repressive regime forced the group into asecret underground existence. Unable to publishany writings or hold any exhibitions for almosttwo decades, they nonetheless kept up theiractivities unceasingly. Working in animated film,Sˇvankmajer was able to make his work public to alarger extent than his fellow surrealists, but evenso his freedom was limited. In 1972, he made un-authorised postproduction changes to Leonardo’sDiary ( Leonarduv denı´ k ), which combines animateddrawings by Leonardo da Vinci with documentarysequences of contemporary life. Consequently, hewas banned from directing films for several years,and he had to interrupt the making of  The Castle of Otranto ( Otrantsky´ za´ mek ), which was completedonly in 1979.During the intervening years, Sˇvankmajer re-jected sight in favour of touch. 5 He turned fromthe film medium to exploring tactility in art, as away to investigate the potential of touch in anocularcentric civilisation. The tactile experimentswere to a large degree executed together with theartist Eva Sˇvankmajerova, but they also involvedthe whole surrealist group and were often doneas one facet of the collective games that wereespecially important for the group in the 1970s. 6 Sculptures, portraits, objects, collages, and evenpoems were used as the basis to explore touchin its capacities as both an epistemological tooland as a stimulant for the imagination. 7 Throughgames and enquiries based on the tactile works,  K. Noheden 2 (page number not for citation purpose)  Sˇvankmajer found that touch has some capacityto afford objective knowledge, but, more impor-tantly, in the right context, it can also activate theimagination in ways that trigger analogical asso-ciations that diverge from the habitual stimulus of purely visual sensations. Sˇvankmajer collected theresults of the games, some of the answers to theenquiries, and reproductions of tactile artworks inthe book Hmat a imaginace , which was first issuedas a samizdat edition in 1983 and then publishedofficially in 1994. The book also contains refer-ences to both various psychoanalysts and MauriceMerleau-Ponty, alongside quotes from or repro-ductions by a number of literary and artisticsources, such as Arthur Rimbaud, Max Ernst,EdgarAllanPoe,MeretOppenheim,ClaudeCahun,and a lengthy extract from the futurist F.T.Marinetti’s writings on ‘‘tactilism.’’ 8 Sˇvankmajer’sresearch, then, rested on both readings in medi-cine and philosophy, and works by artists andwriters that in various ways had incorporatedtactility in their work.Sˇvankmajer’s tactile experiments emphasise theessential value of sense impressions for the imagi-nation. This is in line with the Prague group’soverallconvictionoftheneedforsurrealismtocon-front a stagnant historical present by taking root inraw, brute reality. 9 It also calls for a discussion of surrealism’s overall attitude towards reality andmatter. There is still a recurring misconceptionthat surrealism is an escapist attempt to abandonreality, when the movement in fact has alwaysstriven towards the experience of more facets of reality by integrating it with the imaginary, not toabandon one for the other. 10 Indeed, in strikingcontrast to the popular notion of surrealism asan escape into fantasy, Andre´ Breton early andrepeatedly emphasised its close relation with rea-lity. Most tellingly, as early as in ‘‘Surrealism andPainting’’ (1928), he describes surrealism as re-lated to a ‘‘particular philosophy of immanence,’’which means that it ‘‘would be embodied in realityitself and would be neither superior nor exteriorto it.’’ 11 Then, in Communicating Vessels (1932),Breton states that surrealism strives to ‘‘cast aconduction wire betweenthe far too distant worldsof waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality,reason and madness.’’ 12 In the essay ‘‘The Auto-matic Message’’ (1934), he specifies the imagina-tion’s dependence on the material world in adiscussion of surrealism as an attempt to restorea lost primordial faculty where perception andrepresentation are one (i.e. where the imaginationactively transforms sense impressions). 13 Surreal-ism scholar Michael Richardson even claims that itwas always a surrealist goal not only to enrich theperception of reality through the imagination butalso to lead the imagination away from its purelyvisual aspects and strive for synaesthetic experi-ences of the poetic image. 14 Sˇvankmajer’s tactile experiments can then beseen as one very concrete way of fulfilling theseambitions. He uses tactility to dissolve the de-scriptive registering of the world that sight is sooften the hallmark of, in an attempt to liberate theanalogical imagination of touch. 15 Underlying theexperiments were a conviction that touch has beenneglected in an instrumentally rational and ocu-larcentric civilisation; the Czech surrealist BrunoSolarik even calls Sˇvankmajer’s work with tactil-ity one aspect of the surrealists’ ‘‘anti-crusade’’against civilisation. 16 Sˇvankmajer’s critique of ocu-larcentrism is close to positions found in both filmstudies and anthropology, 17 but he diverges byseeing touch not only as a neglected complementto sight but also as a vehicle for the imagination.This is not least shown in his playful text ‘‘TheMagic Ritual of Tactile Inauguration,’’ which endswith the optimistic statement: ‘‘Because touch,freed from its practical contexts and constantlyrealised as an experience . . . begins to speak withthe voice of a poet.’’ 18 The embodied imagination,then, adds another explicit dimension to thesurrealist attempts to liberate dormant facultiesfrom habitual existence.Sˇvankmajer’s experiments also add an emphasison embodiment to the Czech and Slovak surreal-ists’ focus on Invention, Imagination, Interpretation ,as their concerns were summed up in the title of a 1992 group exhibition in Wales. 19 Imaginationand interpretation are strongly related to analogi-cal thinking, which has long been a centralmethod in surrealist poetic practice since it offersan alternative epistemology of, and relation to,the world. Andre´ Breton’s brief essay ‘‘AscendantSign’’ (1948) is perhaps the most beautiful de-claration of the central place of analogy in sur-realist poetics, in the surrealist method at largeeven. There, Breton expressly states that poeticanalogy can liberate us from the utilitarian relationwith the surroundings that dominate the currentorder. 20 Dictated by analogy, the surrealist poetic The imagination of touch 3 (page number not for citation purpose)  image  * whether visual or in writing  * establishesnew and unexpected relations between diversephenomena, correspondences that stretch beyondmodern civilisation’s habitual worldview. Bretontherefore believes that through the resuscitation of poetic analogy, humans can once again perceive of the world as a forest of signs to be interpreted.Ultimately, this means that analogy has the abilityto reintegrate man and the world. The Czechsurrealists, not least Sˇvankmajer, have forcefullyemphasised the continued importance of poeticanalogy, 21 while tempering Breton’s ascendantoptimism with a more cynical black humour borneout of decades of despair. All the same, Breton’shigh-flying hopes echo clearly in Alena Na´dvornı´-kova´’s conviction that analogical thinking has thepossibility to change not only our perception of the world but also our relation with it, so that‘‘every individual will be a creative mirror of theuniverse.’’ 22 Vratislav Effenberger more harshlyposits analogical thinking as a form of antidote tothe narrow identity principle that structures scien-tific thinking as well as realism in its most narrowsense. 23 Unlike this descriptive way of perceivingthe world, ruled by the reality principle, analogicalthinking is dictated by the pleasure principle, andencourages the active interpretation of the sur-rounding world.The working of the imagination when liberatedfrom utilitarian concerns by analogy and set uponplayfully interpreting the world is tellingly eluci-dated by Andre´ Breton in the essay ‘‘On Surreal-ism in Its Living Works’’ (1953). Here, Bretonstates that the surrealist poetic image makes usrealise that ‘everything above is like everythingbelow’ and everything inside is like every-thing outside. The world thereupon seems tobe like a cryptogram which remains indeci-pherable only so long as one is not thor-oughly familiar with the gymnastics thatpermit one to pass at will from one piece of apparatus to another. 24 The clash of distant phenomena in the surre-alist poetic image thus amounts to a revelationof the world in its heterogeneous unity, anattempt to create a totality that does not dissolvedifferences  * a central argument already in ‘‘TheSecond Manifesto of Surrealism’’ 25  * but containsthem in an ever-expanding, intricate network of correspondences.In accordance with this view, Sˇvankmajer con-siders interpretation of the world viewed as a setof signs and symbols to be a way of uncoveringa more complex reality by going beyond its sur-face. 26 At the same time, it is important toemphasise the fact that Sˇvankmajer is careful todepict this expanded reality with an attentionto the everyday, a result of his ambition to filmwith a style that is as realist as possible, so thatthe eruptions of the imagination are all the morestriking and convincing. 27 This may seem para-doxical, but Effenberger stresses the imagination’sabsolute dependence on reality in no uncertainterms: ‘‘Imagination does not mean turning awayfrom reality, but its antithesis: reaching through tothe dynamic core of reality.’’ 28 When Sˇvankmajer returned to filmmaking afterthe ban was lifted, he sought to bring the expe-riences from the tactile experiments with him tothe film medium. While he first thought it para-doxical to try to transfer touch from the directexperience of objects and plastic artworks to thesecond-hand experience of touch in film, 29 hisreading of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty convinced him ‘‘that sight is capable, to agreater or smaller extent depending on indivi-duals, to transfer tactile sensations in a mediatedway.’’ 30 Sˇvankmajer’s conviction that touch can bemediated via vision is also supported by contem-porary film theory. Like Sˇvankmajer, VivianSobchack largely builds on Merleau-Ponty’s dis-covery that the senses are not discrete, but inter-related. She writes that the sense impressions of the multisensory film experience are not identicalto actual ones, but nonetheless constitute ‘‘a realsensual experience.’’ 31 Sˇvankmajer’s experimentsand their subsequent applications in films alsoseem to indicate that Sobchack’s insight that‘‘[w]e are in fact all synaesthetes Á  and thus seeinga movie can also be an experience of touching,tasting, and smelling it’’ 32 can be applied to sur-realist cinema just as well as to realist films.The first film in which Sˇvankmajer incorporatedhis tactile findings was The Fall of the House of Usher  (  Za´ nik domu Usheru , 1980), an adaptationof Edgar Allan Poe’s short story. The director wasespecially inclined to employ tactile images afterhe realised the importance of touch in Poe’swriting in general and this story in particular. 33 The film is made without actors, and insteadexpresses the tortured mood of the srcinal short  K. Noheden 4 (page number not for citation purpose)  story through matter in agonising transformation.Here, Sˇvankmajer mainly utilises his method of gestural sculpture, where touch makes a directimprint of emotions on clay. The same methodrecurs in Dimensions of Dialogue (  Mozˇ nosti dialogu ,1982), but Sˇvankmajer’s ways of conjuring tacti-lity are otherwise manifold and diverse, and notalways intentional. For while there is an overallincreased emphasis on tactile images in his films inthe years directly after the tactile experiments, hisstriking ability to bring out the coarse materialityof objects and things can also be seen in bothearlier and later films, 34 and it is thus not entirelydependent on the methods he evolved duringthe experiments. Indeed, Sˇvankmajer has said thathis tactile research made him aware of howimportant touch had always been for him. 35 Thereare moments of heightened tactility in early filmssuch as J S Bach Á  Fantasy in G Minor  (  J S Bach Á   Fantasia g-moll  , 1965), Historia Naturae, Suita (1967), and not least The Flat  ( Byt  , 1968), wherethe contents of a cramped flat come alive beforethe eyes and touch of the bewildered protagonist.In the same vein, even when Sˇvankmajer ceasedto actively apply tactile methods to his films, theystill abound with the sort of images that invitethe viewer’s touch, from the putrefying objects in  Alice (  Neˇ co z Alenky , 1987) to the animated animaltongues in Lunacy (Sˇ ileni  , 2005), writhing andslimy to the touch of at least this spectator. 36 Thisis further enhanced by his recurring use of ex-treme close-ups of body parts, objects, and surf-aces, a stylistic device that emphasises texturesand materiality.A sampling of Sˇvankmajer’s various methodscan be found in the feature film Conspirators of Pleasure ( Spiklenci slasti  , 1996), where the resultsof the tactile experiments are incorporated to thearguably most literal degree. Here, several objectscreated as part of the tactile research are used asprops. Among them are metal lids with rubberyappendages attached to one side, rolling pins withnails stuck in them, and a TV set equipped withseveral pairs of robotic hands, to mention but afew. In the diegesis, the objects are all designed bythe main characters, the eponymous conspirators,as sexual objects made to satisfy their peculiardesires. In Conspirators of Pleasure , then, tactility isused in a very direct way, through the incorpora-tion of the results of the experiments. Sometimesthe film makes for an immediate corporeal impact,like when one of the characters kneads bread-crumbs into tiny balls which she then proceeds tosuck into her nostrils through two thin rubberhoses, a sight which may cause uncomfortablesensations in the spectator’s own nostril area. Oneshould also note Sˇvankmajer’s use of sound toenhance the tactility of the images. Both aurallyand visually, in Conspirators of Pleasure disgust anddiscomfort stand out as key features in creatingtactile impressions, whether it is in the form of direct bodily identification with unpleasant ac-tions or sensory impressions of matter, dead orliving, that one is reluctant to touch. TACTILITY, FILM THEORY,AND THE AURA The premise of  Down to the Cellar  is not verycomplicated: a young girl is going down to thecellar of an apartment building to fetch somepotatoes. This deceptively simple narrative takeson new meaning as Sˇvankmajer skilfully showsevents through the wide-eyed perspective of achild, turning the simple visit to the cellar into anightmarish yet humorous journey with heigh-tened sense impressions. The hazards of the every-day start even before the girl descends into theunderworld: a leering man tries to give her candywhen she walks down the stairs, and she has tomake her way past a woman cleaning the floorwho gives her a stern look. A black cat sits at theentrance to the cellar, as if to emphasise the pas-sage as a gateway to another realm. Once in thesemi-darkness of the cellar, things take on new life.Old shoes in storage turn out to have mouths,greedily snapping their leather jaws with pointylittle teeth. A shovel starts shovelling coal on itsown, suspended in the air. And the man fromupstairs turns out to actually live in the cellar,where he lies on a bed filled with coal in lieu of amattress. The woman from the stairway is alsopresent, and is in the process of making an odddough out of eggs and coal dust which she pro-ceeds to bake. Once the girl has made her way pastthese oddities and reached the crate she came for,the potatoes turn out to have their own will,mockingly escaping her by rolling out of the crateand out of her basket. When she has finallymanaged to gather enough of them and is aboutto make her way back up the stairs, the blackcat scares her; twitching, she drops the potatoes. 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