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. Read More »

A documentary which looks at Heartfield primarily as a political activist working in a specific historical context. It demonstrates this relationship by the use of documentary material, such as archive footage of inter-war Germany, in juxtaposition with Heartfield’s works. (These are here frequently shown, as they are rarely reproduced, in their original format as magazine or book covers.) Far from manifesting an obsequious reverence for the works, the film takes the bold step, thoroughly justified by its results, of re-using the elements of Heartfield’s montages for short snippets of photo-animation. It also documents artistic influences on Heartfield’s work – Berlin Dada, which was in general more immediately political in nature than its Zurich counterpart, and George Grosz in particular – and includes a detailed demonstration of how the photomontages were produced and printed.Read More »