Conspirators of Pleasure: Švankmajer's Wordless Fetishes

Spiklenci slasti (1996) is about seventy-five minutes long, has six protagonists, and contains no dialogue. Words appear only where a world produces them without anybody choosing to speak — a television bulletin, a radio, a newspaper headline. Nobody in this film ever tells anybody anything.

They are all, however, extremely busy.

A mild bachelor buys pornographic magazines with the furtiveness of a man collecting a prescription, then goes home and starts cutting them up for materials. His neighbour, an older woman, begins her own project the same week. A postwoman rides her round, comes home, and rolls bread into small firm pellets with a craftswoman’s care. A man in a workshop assembles something out of rolling pins, brushes, fur and clockwork. A television newsreader has her own arrangements, conducted below the desk while she reads the news to the nation. Each of them is building a machine for a private appointment, and the film simply follows the work.

This is the most immediately likeable thing Švankmajer ever made, and the reason is straightforward. He has finally found a subject where his lifelong fascination with objects, hands and tactile obsession has a human motive attached. In Alice the objects are hostile. In Little Otik they are hungry. Here they are wanted.

Silence as a formal decision

The absence of dialogue is the film’s whole architecture, and it does four things at once.

It removes explanation, which means the audience is put in the position of a neighbour watching through a window: you can see what somebody is doing, and you have to work out why from the evidence of their hands. It removes shame, because shame is largely a linguistic event — nobody in this film has to say what they want, so nobody has to lie about it. It makes the foley the entire score, which is Švankmajer’s native register anyway. And it turns the film into a procedural. With no talk, the plot is the labour: acquire, prepare, assemble, test, wait for Sunday.

That last point is why the film is funny rather than sordid. Watch the bachelor collecting his supplies — the umbrella, the feathers, the bits and pieces — with a shopping list in his head and a mild man’s fear of being seen buying any of it. The comedy is entirely one of logistics. He is doing project management. Every one of the six is doing project management, and the joy of the film is watching six people bring real professional competence to bear on absolutely deranged briefs.

The mechanics: why the contraptions have to be homemade

The contraptions are the film’s craft argument, so it is worth being precise about why they land.

Švankmajer builds every one of them out of household junk — brushes, rollers, nails, fur, straw, wire — and shoots the assembly in long, patient stretches of hands working. Nothing is glamorous. Nothing is expensive. The film is set in mid-1990s Prague and everything in it looks like it came out of a drawer.

That poverty of materials produces two effects that a lavish production could never buy. The first is credibility: a device made of things you own is a device you could make, which puts the film’s fetishists on your side of the screen rather than in a zoo. The second is effort. Because the parts are junk, the work is visible — filing, gluing, testing, adjusting. Švankmajer keeps the camera on the making because the making is the point. Desire in this film is measured in hours of labour, and by Sunday you have watched every character earn their appointment.

Compare the sound design. Švankmajer foleys the contraptions until they sound like animals — rasps, whirs, wet slaps, the scratch of bristles on skin. There is no music to signal arousal, disgust or comedy, so the audience’s reaction is generated entirely by texture and pace. This is the same instrument he had been building since the shorts, and it is the reason his stop motion never needs to be good in the modern sense. His ask of the audience is that you imagine touching the object, which is a far shorter path into the nervous system than belief. The devil’s clay in Faust works on the identical principle.

The editing is the last mechanism. Švankmajer cross-cuts the six preparations so that they progress in lockstep, which makes the film a heist picture. Six crews. One date. The tension is entirely “will they get it built in time”, and the payoff is a synchronised Sunday of consummations that Švankmajer intercuts like a bank job going down.

The web

Here is the film’s best structural joke: the six are connected, and none of them knows.

The bachelor’s obsession is his neighbour. The neighbour’s obsession is him. The man in the workshop is fixated on the newsreader; the newsreader is fixated on something else entirely; the postwoman delivers to all of them. Every character is a link in a chain that would resolve into ordinary reciprocated desire if a single person said a single word — and Švankmajer has removed words from the universe, so the chain never closes.

That is a genuinely sophisticated piece of writing, and it converts the film from a catalogue of perversions into an argument about privacy. These people are strange because they are private, and privacy in a city is a load-bearing wall: it is the only thing that lets a person build a chicken costume in peace, and it is the thing that guarantees the woman upstairs will never find out he was thinking of her.

Švankmajer plays this with no moral at all. Nobody is punished. Nobody is cured. Nobody is exposed. The film’s radical position is that these arrangements work — that six people got exactly what they wanted on Sunday, at some effort, harming no one — and it holds that position without a wink.

The real ancestor

The obvious cross-reference is Luis Buñuel, and for once the obvious one is correct. Švankmajer is a card-carrying surrealist and Buñuel is the tradition’s cinema; the DNA here is Belle de Jour, which is likewise about a private erotic architecture built in the gaps of a respectable life, and The Phantom of Liberty, which likewise runs a relay of unconnected people through a chain that never closes.

The difference is class, and it is decisive. Buñuel’s fetishists are bourgeois; their perversity is an escape from comfort, and the joke is on the drawing room. Švankmajer’s are shift workers in a post-communist apartment block whose perversity is assembled from bin scrapings on their own time. That relocation is the film’s real contribution to the surrealist tradition: desire as a hobby of the working week, pursued with the same seriousness as a model railway.

The other ancestor is the director’s own back catalogue. Anyone who has seen his shorts knows the fixation on mouths, tongues, food and hands. Conspirators is the film where that fixation stops being a symptom and becomes a subject.

The honest case against

The film is repetitive by design, and design does not make a thing less repetitive. Six parallel builds, each proceeding through the same phases, is a structure with a governor on it — you understand the machine by minute twenty, and the remaining fifty are elaboration. Švankmajer’s refusal of psychology means there is nothing to discover about these people beyond what they are making.

There is also an unevenness in the six strands that the cross-cutting cannot hide. The neighbour-effigy pair is a complete short film with a real emotional charge. The bread-pellet strand is a single gag stretched to a running length. The film knows its best material and returns to it, which throws the weaker strands into relief.

And Švankmajer’s tactility, applied to bodies rather than props, is not for everyone in a way that goes beyond squeamishness. The film’s climaxes are hard to watch precisely because they are so unerotic — all bristle and slap and effort, filmed close.

The verdict lands on generosity. This is the one film in the Švankmajer catalogue with no contempt in it. The misanthropy that curdles Little Otik and freezes Faust is entirely absent; he looks at six people doing something ridiculous, and he takes their ridiculousness seriously as work. That warmth is the surprise, and seventy-five minutes is exactly the right length for it.

Where to find it: Conspirators of Pleasure circulates on the Švankmajer discs and drifts through the arthouse streaming tier. It is the correct entry point to the director for anyone who has bounced off him before.

Spoilers below

Sunday arrives, and Švankmajer cuts the six consummations together as one sequence. It is the best-edited passage of his career: rhythms matching across strands, a rolling pin here answering a wing-beat there, six unrelated rooms in one city breathing at the same tempo. He has built a montage out of the fact that everybody is doing this at once and nobody knows.

Then Monday, and the film’s real ending. The bachelor and his neighbour meet on the stairs. They nod. They pass. He is carrying the shopping; she has her bag. Two people who spent a week building elaborate effigies of one another exchange the exact quantity of civility that neighbours owe each other, and go inside.

The final beat is the postwoman, back on her round, delivering to the same doors — and the last image tips the whole film sideways, because it suggests the cycle is not a cycle at all. Something has escalated. Švankmajer ends on the implication that these appointments are getting bigger, that the machinery will need more next Sunday, and that the wall between the private life and the stairwell is thinner this week than it was last.

He declines, absolutely, to say whether that is a tragedy. The gag and the dread arrive in the same shot, and he lets you decide which one you brought with you.