Tim's Toons: Sex in clay
Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 9:30PM 
For The Lusty Month of May, we're looking at a few sex scenes. Here's Tim...
Say "animated sex", and two things immediately leap to mind. If you’'e hung up on American cinema, it's the self-consciously edgy and smutty underground animation of the '70s - Fritz the Cat and its heirs. Or, God help you, maybe it's the legendary (and, to be fair, very much exaggerated) cult of anime tentacle porn out of Japan. We are not going to talk about either one of those things.
Though in fairness, the particular animated sex scene I have in mind isn't much less disturbing than mythological Japanese fetish porn. It's the second segment of Jan Švankmajer's 1982 short Dimensions of Dialogue, one of the most important works of Czechoslovakian animation. I promise that Czechoslovakian animation is definitely a thing.
The whole movie is available online, and it’s pretty NSFW even for totally non-sexual reasons. If you have a reasonably strong stomach for grotesque manipulations of synthetic bodies in stop-motion animation, I'd beg you to watch the whole thing, but the sex is only in the second part starting at 5:02, "Passionate Dialogue". Or "Dialog vášnivý" to the Czech speakers in the crowd.
Dimensions of Dialogue, as a whole, is about the way that communication fails humans, and how we fail to communicate, because it was the Eastern Bloc during Communism and happy cinema was forbidden. "Passionate Dialogue" is as straightforward as it is pessimistic: a man and a woman have mind-blowing sex, so great that they both lose a little part of themselves to it (and make a little clay baby). And then they're done, and they pretty much have nothing to say to each other besides staring blankly at each other and angrily at the physical manifestation of their recent coupling.
Celebratory it ain't, but I think I can still force something of a sex-positive spin on it. Because before the chilly second half of the story kicks in, "Passionate Dialogue" is one of the most evocative depictions of actual lovemaking, as opposed to just hot screwing,*, in any movie I can name, animated or otherwise.
*(Author's note: I certainly don’t want to belittle hot movie screwing, which can be a wonderful thing - Jose just paid tribute to one of my favorite recent scenes of hot movie screwing on this very site).
What "Passionate Dialogue" depicts, something that could only be shown in some form of animation or another, is the act of two lovers literally dissolving into one another. Much poetry and song and art, some good and mostly bad, has been dedicated to the unifying one-ness of really great sex, where the partners lose all their individuality and become completely part of each other. Švankmajer's film makes this idea as literal as it possibly could be: we are watching a profoundly intimate moment, the complete loss of individual self to the sex act, reducing the couple to an indiscernible mass of unnervingly fleshy clay. Only occasionally does one brief physical sensation announce itself so profoundly that a single body can briefly emerge from the blurry mass of their intertwined bodies.
It's not erotic, in the way that several of our Lusty Month of May entries have been - no, this is the internet, I can't pretend that nobody out there finds distinctly soulless, frighteningly organic clay mannequins having horror-sex erotic. Let's just say that I don't. But as an intellectually abstracted depiction of eroticism, this is one of the most visceral and memorable sex scenes I've ever seen, even a little tender and generous. It has to end badly, or it wouldn't be sufficiently dour and sad for audiences in the Eastern Bloc. But for a while, those clay partners look like they're really into it.
Reader Comments (3)
i watched the passionate dialogue portion of this last night -- thanks for the heads up. Czech movies (or whenever they use animation -- sometimes in conjunction with live-action) are always so messy weird and unsettling. But that said I did kind of like it, at least thematically. Especially when the couple has a disagreement over something that at first I thought was a baby but could really be interpreted as any issue between a couple.
Huh. Never heard of this but it sounds fascinating so I will definitely check it out. Great write-up.
I love Svankmajer's visual art - I would hesitate to call this work a film. I would recommend you to watch his story the Fall of House Usher. One of the best haunted stories I have ever seen, and I'm a big fan.