I don’t feel Sweet Movie is full of death, in the sense that this may be the overpowering conceit of the film. However, the fact of the matter is that “the world is full of corpses” as Sailor Potemkin says. Director Dusan Makavejev shows you this world. He shows it to you through the actuality footage of the Katyn massacre. His characters are given the power of life over death in the fictional strand of the film. The Katyn massacre is ours in reality. These victims refuse to stay buried. And life still prevails, even in the face of a massacre. Note the personal objects that are recovered from the corpses. Pictures of smiling, happy families that remain eternal.

Why do we need to wallow in this? To remind ourselves that we must think of these things always and speak of them ALWAYS, in opposition to the wishes of the British minister. Otherwise a succession of Katyns occur. Why are the only things we taste in the film sugar and excrement? Because that is all there is. There are only two tastes: sweet and sour. Either pleasant or unpleasant. What happens when the traditional unpleasantness becomes a source of pleasure and the traditional pleasantness becomes a source of death? This is the postulate Makavejev attempts to exercise. He is a destructive artist who is all about upending traditional values.

Let me offer a quotation from Villem Flusser:

“There is a passage in Sartre in which the circularity of the aesthetic universe is clearly articulated. He describes a honey pot in which we are immersed, and where we spend our time licking that sweet stuff — up to the point that we are overcome with nausea in regard to the honey and to ourselves, and we begin to vomit. That nausea, which propels us out of sweet habit into terror and which shows us our own emptiness as opposed to the excessive fullness of kitsch, is precisely what we might call our ‘humanity’. We are hollow, the world is full, and the moment we become aware of this we begin to vomit that fullness from out of our hollowness. And this vomit is not only a sign of our becoming human, it is also what we mean when we use the word art. Art and human are synonymous, and they both mean that we deny the fullness of the world (its being such). They both mean that we are not animals governed by habit, but human beings, meaning artists.”

On tastes, everything comes in degrees of the two outer poles, which are sweet and sour (or bitter if you prefer). Makavejev is the type of artist to give you extremes more than degrees (for better or for worse). But the film is called Sweet Movie. So you have to ask yourself if Makavejev is propelling you out of your “sweet habits”. You’d do good to start with an analysis of what those habits are, before moving on to what he is propelling you into and why.

More from Flusser:

“If one slides along the scale of values somewhat more down to earth, one needs no longer to stammer, one can speak reasonably. This is because the gray zone of beauty grows ever more gray, and thus beauty changes imperceptibly into prettiness…The more convenient the reception of the information contained within a work of art is, the prettier that work is. If one applies the basic law of communication, which states that information and communication are inversely proportional, one may measure how much a specific work communicates: the better it communicates (the more redundancies it contains), the less it informs. In other terms: the easier it is to decipher a work of art, the prettier it is, and therefore the more successful…The less it disturbs habit, the prettier it becomes.”

Regarding my theorizing of taste, I am oversimplifying to aid our analysis. Since Makavejev operates in extremes (not always, but often), I wanted to posit the two ends he shuttles between. Yes, the world is diverse and multi-dimensional. Regardless, I think we get a lot of oppositions in this film. Sailor Potemkin being bathed in sugar, the commune members bathing themselves in shit, Miss Canada being bathed in chocolate. There is a constant dance, or slide, along the scales in this film. Children being seduced with candy (the same way Miss Canada seduces us in her chocolate dance of death), children being seduced by erotic dance, children being murdered, children rising from their bodybags. And this film certainly moves from humor to horror. The Katyn sequence is exhibit A in this instance.

Death by chocolate in "Sweet Movie".

I believe our sweet habits are our complacencies in life. Regarding sex, death, any number of societal mores and so on. Your very reactions to the film are your own sweet habits that Makavejev is trying to awaken you from. He raises bodies from the ground so you can see; resurrects children that we suffocate with our adult sweet habits and has them look you in the eye.

Sweet Movie is full of redundancies and repetitions. Gabriel Tarde said that repetition and opposition are among the keys that open up the arcana of the universe. There are ghostly echoes throughout this film if one watches and listens to it closely. Sweet Movie is not convenient, it is not a pretty work of art. It communicates more and informs less. It is not easy to decipher and therefore is not a successful work of art (in terms of mainstream, habitual success). It disturbs habit. Again, it is a destructive film.

I really believe Flusser’s writings are key in understanding this film, so I will offer more:

“Much more interesting (more graspable), however, is the imprecise passage between that extreme zone and the one that we can just stand without cracking…It is that gray zone where terror turns into enthusiasm, ugliness into beauty…And there is yet another way to put it: this is that gray zone into which those artists have climbed who have attempted, at the risk of their lives, to utter that which is unutterable, to render audible that which is ineffable, to render visible that which is hidden.”

Is the Katyn actuality sequence different from the commune sequence? That is for you the viewer to decide. Maybe there are thematic similarities, maybe formal similarities, maybe not. Why is Makavejev dealing in extremes? Why not? Why do some artists stick to representational schemes and some abstract? It is his mode of expression. Something he carries deep within his soul and probably is not even consciously aware of. Is it possible to get too much of a good thing, in Makavejev’s view? I think that is clear from the final scene in the film. Death by chocolate. Beyond too much of a good thing, how about what happens when good things get perverted? Makavejev explores that on a number of levels in this film.

The unutterable in "Sweet Movie".

Regarding communicating versus informing I am saying that one or the other may be too much of a good (or bad) thing. Some films talk loud and say nothing. Some films talk softly and say everything. Some films communicate too many things and do not inform. Some films inform without communicating why. And then we have to judge the ethics of said communication/information.

“To utter that which is unutterable.”