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IN SWEDISH ARTIST Nathalie Djurberg's claymation Him The Necessity of Loss, 2006, a man who cannot resist acting on his overwhelming attraction to a young girl decides he must castrate himself. But he still has arms with which to touch her, and so lie lops off one of them, then both his legs, and finally his head. But even this disembodied state won't "save" him from the feared inappropriate sexual liaison: At this point the girl cheerfully removes her underwear and sits on his face.
Djurberg's short claymation films (of which The Necessity of Loss is by no means the most extreme or unsparing) are often reminiscent, in their schematic character, of archetypal scenes from Freud's theories of sexuality-except that Djurberg's narratives seem bluntly literal, as it taking place in a realm where repression has burned off completely. A man's body, here, is not symbolically parceled but actually parceled. Events unfold with a curious simplicity, driving them closer to the realm of fairy tales; but in Djurberg's stories mythical threats and nightmares are not overcome. As in fairy tales, animals commonly appear, but they don't seem in symbolic service to any human psychic economy, even as they perform sexual favors-like the moose that a belligerent queen humps as they ride together through a forest (The secret Hiindshtike, 2006), the queen clinging to the moose's underside.
Composer Hans Berg scores her films, but Djurberg executes every other aspect of the labor-intensive process of stop-motion animation herself, rendering her figures and the sets she builds to house them with painstaking care. The figures' clothing is handmade, and each interior features its own elaborate, studied aesthetic-Rococo, Spanish Colonial, imperial Prussian-to which Berg's charmingly layered music is delicately attuned. The overall effect is meticulous, but handcrafted rather than slick. Almost everything is plasticine, and thereby ingeniously subsumed into material uniformity; even coffee poured from a coffeepot is made of this hobby-shop putty, as is a room's picture-frame molding, giving the walls the appearance of iced cakes.
Djurberg studied at Sweden's Malmo Art...