ABSTRACT
Jan Švankmajer’s short stop-motion animation film Meat Love (1989) offers an entrancing vision of carnal romance or, perhaps more aptly, carnal necromance. After a suspended knife cuts two slices of steak from a hunk of meat resting on a kitchen work-surface, the pieces spring to life to court and caper over the table. Waltzing over a chopping board after a bawdy seduction, the steaks consummate their passion in a plate of billowing flour. In keeping with švankmajer’s lauded model of ‘total animation’ in which all matter is given visceral vitality (Dryje 152), this short film puts meat in motion. Animation, indicating both the capacity for movement and the process of giving life to the hitherto inert, has been positioned as one exemplar of the uncanny, provoking unsettling ‘doubts as to whether an apparently animate being is really alive, or conversely whether a lifeless object might in fact be animate’ (E. Jentsch, cited in Freud 135). Here, however, the playful antics of Meat Love’s courting steaks have an exuberant, even magical air, enchanting in their frolicsome movements.
