Centering on the argument that it is inappropriate to analyze Surrealist works through the lens of realism, this article proposes a unique way of interpreting Jan Švankmajer’s film Food, emphasizing that the fusion of reality and the unconscious is the essence of the work.

Before we get started

It’s wrong to analyze surrealist works in the same way as traditional realist works. It would be worse than dressing a child in children’s clothes because he is still a child, when he is already as big as an adult. Such an interpretation would suffocate the essence of a Surrealist work. Surrealist works are not cadavers laid out in a laboratory for dissection. They are, from the very beginning, an effort to escape the shackles and bondage of reason and to express the irrational or unreal world hidden in the unconscious. To analyze surrealist works from a logical and pragmatic point of view would be to diminish or destroy their inherent fun. In other words, surrealist works are like dreams. When you describe a dream, you don’t say, “Describe it in terms of cause and effect based on the six principles.” In dreams, oceans can become mountains and people can run faster than cars. This is because dreams are not real. Because dreams transcend reality, they provide a sense of fun that real-life stories do not. This is why we want to listen to dream stories. Similarly, surrealist works are meant to be appreciated rather than analyzed. Surrealist works are not overly moralizing, nor do they have plots that rely on causality. Instead, it’s about the pleasure of seeing the real and the unreal exist together, and the world of the unconscious, free from logic and rational thought. This method of expression is called autodidactic. However, it shouldn’t be overlooked that surrealist works aren’t just nonsense. Just as dreams are beyond reality, but not independent of it. Rather, dreams are intimately connected to reality, and instincts that are suppressed by the censorship of reason in the waking world are unleashed in dreams. This is probably why Freud tried to interpret dreams. Similarly, Surrealist works are rooted in reality. That is why Surrealist works do not reject or turn away from reality, but rather try to reach an absolute reality where reality and dreams are fused. Therefore, I think the way to analyze Surrealist works is to understand how reality is reflected in the unconscious and how it is expressed in the works.

Analyzing the work

Jan Švankmajer’s Food is a trilogy divided into Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. The everyday words and actions of breakfast, lunch, and dinner are transformed into something completely new when surrealism meets surrealism. In Breakfast, the irony of the process of supplying and consuming food is explored; in Lunch, the appetite of the haves and have-nots in a state of famine; and in Dinner, people use their bodies as cooking utensils. These three episodes are strongly satirical in nature and are presented with shocking and naked visuals. It’s as if they are trying to turn everyday life upside down by revealing the hidden meanings behind the familiar.
Before analyzing these works one by one, it is necessary to briefly discuss the Czech Republic’s Prague Spring. Jan Švankmajer’s work is closely linked to the Czech Surrealist art movement, which is deeply connected to the 1968 Soviet invasion of the Czech Republic and the Prague Spring. The Czech Republic was the political, economic, and cultural center of Eastern Europe before World War II, but was forcibly communized by the Soviet Union after the war. As liberalization began in the mid-1950s, Czech intellectuals demanded the establishment of a democratic regime, which was rejected by the Novotny regime. A dissident movement arose, and eventually Dubček, a reformer, came to power. The Czech reformers advocated “socialism with a human face” and aimed to abolish prior censorship, create a democratic electoral system, and ensure freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association. These policies were a far cry from the one-party dictatorship of the Communist Party advocated by Stalin. The reforms in the Czech Republic led to the establishment of many social organizations and the transition of the society from communism to democracy. This is known as the “Prague Spring of 1968”. Fearing that these changes would spread to other countries, the Soviet Union mobilized troops from Eastern European countries to invade the Czech Republic. During this process, many Czechs who resisted the Soviets were killed or fled to other countries, and a communist dictatorship was established in the Czech Republic again.
These historical facts had a strong influence on Czech Surrealism’s critical and subversive characterization of a contradictory and oppressive society. This influence is also evident in the work of Jan Švankmajer. The poignant criticism of reality in his work is also an extension of the character of Czech Surrealism. The historical event of the Prague Spring in the Czech Republic and the reality of Eastern Europe at the time are key to understanding this work. After the Prague Spring, both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe suffered from economic stagnation. As a result of economic policies that emphasized heavy industry, shortages of consumer goods became severe, and Eastern Europe began to become a burden on the Soviet Union. The failure of economic policies led to political reforms in many Eastern Bloc countries. In Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to mass protests and the formation of a dissident organization, the Civic Forum, which eventually toppled the communist regime. Dubček was also reinstated, and democratization was short-lived, but ethnic problems in Korea prevented the country from stabilizing.
This work was produced in 1992. Since the late 1980s, the Czech Republic has been in transition, and in this unstable situation, there was little chance that the economic difficulties would be resolved. Everything was scarce, and the desire to fill that scarcity was intense. The obsession with food, in particular, was perhaps at an all-time high. As the Western capitalist system was gradually entering the country on a wave of liberalization, Food is a surrealist look at how the excessive desire for food, coupled with the capitalist system, leads to deformities. Let’s take a look at how these elements appear in each episode.

First, Breakfast.

A man, A, enters a narrow room, removes his hat and sits down on a chair. A reads the instructions on the food machine, B, in front of him, takes out money, puts it in B’s mouth, and activates it by hitting him hard on the head and gouging out his eyes. As sausages, bread, and beer emerge from B’s chest, A punches B in the jaw and begins to eat the food using a fork and knife that come out of B’s ear. After gorging himself, A punches B’s foot to get a napkin to wipe his mouth, turning A into a food machine and B back into a human. B hangs the instructions around the food machine’s neck, draws a line on the wall of the room, and leaves. The new man, C, acts on the directive around A’s neck and eats the food. He then wipes his napkin and C turns into a food machine, and A turns back into a human. A draws a line on the wall of the room, opens the door, and leaves. A long line of people follows, visible through the open door.
The imagination of a person turning into a food machine and then back into a person is the most important bone of this episode, and it epitomizes surrealism. This imagination cannot come from the control of reason, but from the unconscious. It is also full of witty expressions, such as forks and knives coming out of the ears when you hit your chin. But what are these expressions meant to show? The most important point here is the change in supply and demand. People who want to eat food are the demand, and the food machines that serve it are the supply. This supply and demand is constantly changing. It’s a unique setup where a person turns into a food machine after eating food, and then turns back into a person after serving food.
Initially, A eats sausage and bread from B for money. Then, A takes money from C and serves him sausage and bread. In the end, A is no different when he enters and leaves the small room. The money he paid to B for the sausage and bread he receives back from C. He then gives C the sausage and bread that he took from B and ate. Nothing changes as a result, but he will think he has eaten. The most important thing in this change in supply and demand is money. People put money into the food machine to get food, and money is how they get food. The supply and demand keeps changing, but no food is actually created. Just a pile of disposable cups, plates, forks, and knives in a small room. Goods go around and around, but nothing is produced. Only garbage remains. This episode shows the contradictions of the capitalist economic system in relation to human appetite.

Second, Lunch.

A rich man and a poor man are sitting across from each other in a restaurant. The rich man cleans his plate, fork, and knife, and the poor man follows suit. The waiter walks by them, pretending to be busy, and they call out to him, but to no avail. The poor man’s stomach rumbles. The rich man rearranges the flowers in the vase on the table, and the poor man tries to imitate him, but the flowers are disheveled. The poor man tries to eat a fallen flower, but the rich man looks at him with disdain, snatches it out of his mouth and pins it to his coat. The rich man, seeing this, takes the flower from the vase, places it on his plate, and eats it. The poor man also eats the flower from his garment. The rich man drinks the water from the vase, and the poor man eats the whole vase. The rich man eats his napkin, the poor man eats his dirty handkerchief. A waiter hurries by them. The rich man eats his shoes, the poor man eats his shoes. The rich man eats suspenders, pants, jacket, waistcoat, tie, and underpants; the poor man eats loincloth, pants, jacket, T-shirt, and underpants. The rich man eats the plate, tablecloth, table, and chair, and the poor man eats the plate, tablecloth, table, and chair. When he’s finished, the rich man puts his fork and knife in his mouth, but then pulls them out again with a sneering expression and tries to eat the poor man.
As in the first episode, the setting of a man’s appetite consuming everything, including his clothes and the table, is a great example of surrealist imagination. However, the show isn’t just about human appetite. It’s important to look at the differences between the three characters here. In this episode, the rich man in the fine suit could be represented as an inheritor, while the poor man in raggedy clothes could be represented as a childless man. They are both in the same situation. They are in a famine situation with no food available. They eat everything they can get their hands on. What’s important here is that the legacy has priority. Just as in a capitalist society, priority is always given to those who have it, in this episode, the rich man always eats first. The poor man tries to eat a flower that fell by chance, but the rich man looks at him with disdain, so he gives it up and pins it to his shirt. This is a poignant commentary on capitalism, which always favors the rich. Another character that should not be overlooked is the waiter. The waiter’s job is to take orders from customers and serve them food, but he doesn’t do that. He is portrayed as an incompetent government that should be solving social problems. When everything is eaten and there is nothing left to eat, the rich want to eat the poor. The greed of the rich to have more and more is clearly shown in Lunch.

Third, Dinner.

A man sits at the table and decorates his food with various spices, sauces, and salads. The sauces and vegetables on the table make it difficult to see the food that the man is carefully decorating. When the man is finished, he nails the fork to his prosthetic hand. After the fork is secured to the prosthetic hand, the man begins to eat the food he has decorated, which is his hand. In another, a soccer player tries to eat one of his food-decorated legs; in another, a woman tries to eat her decorated breast; in another, a man tries to eat his decorated penis and covers it with his hand, gesturing for the viewer to leave.
The setting is both grotesque and surrealistic, with people eating their own body parts. People who eat their own bodies because their appetite is at its peak. When you live for the pleasure of the moment, even the most important things are put on the table. Hands, feet, breasts, and genitals are no longer human bodies, but food. Kant’s words, “Never treat a person as a means, but always as an end,” have become meaningless. In a capitalist society, the body becomes a means to an end, not a human being. The work clearly shows the deformity of human gluttony in a society that has reduced the body to a means.
This work interprets the food we commonly encounter from a new perspective. The familiar act of eating becomes unfamiliar to us in this work. This unfamiliarity makes us rethink the act of eating, but it goes beyond the act of eating to insights into society. This is because the director wanted the film to be about more than just the act of eating. Through the act of eating, the director wanted to portray society and civilization. In particular, he wanted to show the contradictions of capitalist society, and these traces are visible throughout the film. Therefore, the film is not just a depiction of the act of eating food, but also a look at capitalism from the unconscious world.

Closing remarks

The film Food is a surrealist portrayal of how human appetite is transformed into gluttony in capitalist society, and how it becomes deformed through strong satire and poignant criticism. This work shows that Surrealism does not ignore or reject reality, but rather reflects it more actively. Dreams are a reflection of reality without the censorship of reason. Therefore, in order to understand a dream, you need to know the reality of the person who dreamed it. Similarly, surrealist works are unconscious reflections of reality without the censorship of reason. Therefore, to understand surrealist works, it is fundamental to look at reality. You can discover new meanings or facts through the unconscious that you have not seen in reality due to the censorship of reason, and it is surrealist works that contain such things. I think the most surrealist analysis is to inform the audience of new discoveries through the unconscious and to entertain them through this.