Shingle22J - 5th Edition 2015

In his Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – V Sonata C-dur kv-13, Neumann claims the right to contaminate, at the end of the 1900s, a 16th-century painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (who is famous for his manneristic portraits made from fruit, vegetables, fish – but also flowers and books) and an 18th-century composer, W. A. Mozart. This mix of food, different styles, time periods, gestures and notes incredibly works, giving life to a movie that is a tasty treat for the eyes and the ears. The flap of a butterfly’s wings instills life into an exhibitionist banana, then into a pickle, then a pear, two cherries and so on. At the end, the fruits and vegetables form two Arcimboldo-like profiles kissing. The meaning of all this is that where there is life there is love, and this is always true, in every century. Just one regret: the animation could have been better. This flaw, for a genius of his caliber, is unexpected to say the least.

But let’s go back to Arcimboldo. The first section of Dimensions of Dialogue, Jan Svankmajer’s most famous and appreciated animation movie, nods to the celebrated painter. Two Arcimboldo-like heads facing each other cannibalize and continuously devour and vomit each other back out again, until they are reduced to bland copies. Its effect? Powerful. Its idea? Brand new. Its meaning? None. Or, better still: any and all.

In Communist Czechoslovakia, Svankmajer dared show off, in front of his friends and enemies, his adherence to surrealist principles, stating that he drew inspiration from his dreams and embraced improvisation and free-flow writing. As much as you try, you won’t find anything similar to these concepts in the officially approved socialist realism that, instead, was pedagogical, one-dimensional, propagandistic and tasteless. Therefore, the director found, in the back of his mind, among his old school memories, that weird painter from Milan who, four hundred years back, had caused a scandal during his stay in Prague. He took this memory, mixed it with his propensity for synesthesia (his tactile sculptures had already been exhibited) and served a movie starring fruit and vegetables.

We talked about vomit earlier on. The theme is far from attractive, and, after all, has little to do with food. However, some authors have taken on the challenge. American Bill Plympton for one, who tackled the issue various times but never successfully; Italian Mario Addis does so in La materia (The subject): same topic, better results. In this film, a fat professor vomits his knowledge to his students, who are horrified at first but gradually end up feeding on the disgusting subject.

Mario Addis does exactly what we were taught in high school that Roman Gaius Petronius Arbiter, reputed author of the Satyricon, once did: he can walk in mud without dirtying his shoes. His drawings are so exquisite and the theme is treated so lightly that his works are offensive only in our expectations, while in reality they are charming. This is true for La materia that, moreover, is not a movie about food, it is about power and – imposed and accepted – submission.

Dear food lovers, your palate is evidently a too individualistic virtue to be adequately depicted by a mass mechanism like cinema… but you/ we can take comfort in the fact that orange roasted duck, caviar or foie gras have never found their place in other art disciplines either. Wine being the only exception. So, let us toast to our good fortune with sparkling wine, bubbling in the glass (Pietro Mascagni, Cavalleria rusticana)!