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Conspirators of Pleasure
(Spiklenci slasti)

Screening on Film
Directed by Jan Svankmajer .
With Petr Meissel, Gabriela Wihelmová, Barbora Hrzánová.
Czech Republic/Switzerland , 1996, 35mm, color, 75 min.
Print source: Irena Kovarova

Perhaps the most experimental of Svankmajer’s feature films, Conspirators of Pleasure has no dialogue but features a baroque narrative, concerning a group of people each of whom has developed his or her own elaborate autoerotic rituals involving food, inanimate objects and occasionally other living beings. Conspirators is thus that rare object: a truly perverse film, one that suggests that there is a domain of solitary eroticism, wherein sexuality is meant not to unite two (or more) people but rather becomes a vehicle for the imagination. With its refusal of dialogue, the film forces the spectator to become a fellow conspirator, filling in the gaps in the chain that link Svankmajer’s perverts.

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