CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS
Dir. Helmut Herbst, 2006
Germany. 58 min.
In German with English subtitles.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20 – 10 PM
THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS (DIE KATHEDRALE DER NEUEN GEFÜHLE) – 2006, Cinegrafik, 60 min. Dir. Helmut Herbst. On a shortlist with Eiichi Yamamoto’s BELLADONNA OF SADNESS and René Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET as one of the most surreal, psychedelic and truly cosmic animated features ever made, German director Helmut Herbst’s utterly insane THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS follows a commune of Berlin stoners and intellectuals who get set adrift in space in 1972 in a packing container clutched in a giant flying hand. Various space flotsam smashes into the windshield – enormous insects, Mighty Mouse, a Bird Man from “Flash Gordon” – while hypnotic Krautrock drones in the background moaning “Where am I??”, and a naked man bounces up and down off a massive red pepper. So begins our descent down the psychotic rabbit hole of CATHEDRAL, a true hallucinogenic Space Freakout if there ever was one: imagine Ralph Bakshi animating an R-rated version of John Carpenter’s DARK STAR. The movie’s genesis is equally strange: apparently based on a 1974 film by Herbst called “Die phantastische Welt des Matthew Madson,” CATHEDRAL was eventually finished after a decades-long gestation in 2006. One of the rarest and most obscure tiles in world animation.
THE SON OF THE STARS
Dir. Mircea Toia & Călin Cazan, 1988
Romania. 78 min.
In Romanian with English subtitles.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 10 PM
From the Romanian animators behind DELTA SPACE MISSION, THE SON OF THE STARS is an even more wildly ambitious and surreal outer space adventure, a mid-1980s mash-up of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, ALIEN and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan. In the year 6470, a husband and wife team of explorers receive a mysterious distress signal from a female astronaut who disappeared decades earlier. They leave their son, Dan, on board their ship while they go searching for the missing woman — but fate intervenes, crash-landing the ship on a jungle-like planet populated by bulbous, telekinetic aliens and eerie stone gardens of frozen space creatures.