Jan Švankmajer's final short film is a shocker, a return to an allegory he conceived of in the 1970s but which was unproducable under the Communist system. On one level, that's odd: every point made in Food could be spun as anti-capitalist. But under a system which famously banned him from directing for making irreverent musical choices, it's hard to really have a discussion over the political nuance of someone eating their own hand.

The autocannibalism occurs in the last of the film's three segments, 'Dinner', in which an upscale restaurant setting and a generous array of condiments blinds the diners to the horror of what they're doing. Each gourmand devours something which is essential to themselves; an athlete eats his leg, a woman eats her breasts, a man eats his penis. The other two segments, 'Breakfast' and 'Lunch', are less graphic but similarly pointed. In 'Breakfast' a man grabs and attacks his dinner companion, who turns out to be a kind of human dumb waiter who dispenses food and utensils obediently with every punch. 'Lunch' is a short farce about two people who, unable to attract the attention of a waiter (perhaps he's heard about how they get treated at breakfast), resort to eating the table and plates.

Throughout the three segments, we can tick off a lot of Švankmajer trademarks, from the formal (the rapid-fire montages of stills that open each episode) to the philosophical. He believes civilisation is a way of denying that we are helpless before our animal needs, and this denial ends up perverting those needs and making them bizarre - leading us to eat a table, or a plate, or ourselves, when a nice meal would be better.

How different would this have been if it could have been made in the 1970s? I think it would have been less disturbing; the smoothness of Švankmajer's technique now allows him to seamlessly switch between real humans and plasticine models, which makes the violence more shocking than it is in gorier, fully animated shorts like Darkness-Light-Darkness or The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. Other than his increased technical confidence, the only other sign that this was made in the '90s is 'Lunch', which proves that, by 1993, the floppy centre-parted indie-boy haircut pioneered by Brett Anderson had made it into Prague. Communism could never stand up to such decadent pleasures.