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, or the cartoon equivalent of Can’s “Ege Bamyasi” or Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine.” In other words: set the controls for the heart of the sun. Narrated by the ship’s doctor Quistard in the same synthesized voice everyone uses, the crew includes the female commander Bakunskaja with long gray hair and a pink hippie frock; lizard-tongued head of security Dierksen; and James and Jones, a pair of redheaded and often bare-breasted twins. The crew spend their days staring into the pulsating light of the fusion reactor wondering about the outcome of the Vietnam War, or bemoaning their sexual inertia: “Do you know what an erotically stale situation is? … Eternal lust and unspeakable horror. All empty promises.” Their descent into moral and political lethargy is interrupted by the arrival of a very attractive young man, Mulligan, who’s discovered in their monthly supply shipment from the discount store. Eventually this screwy crew of seriously baked stoners find themselves searching for the enigmatic Matthew Madson, a Yeti-like wild man who may be the mysterious astronaut who first convinced them to embark on their deranged odyssey. Visually the film is like no other, filled with holographic blue phallus plants and characters morphing into gray fleshy blobs every time they pass a Black Hole, constantly disrobing and attempting to seduce each other (and despite the random nudity, the crewmembers are weirdly androgynous as if genders are becoming meaningless.) The dialogue is equally bizarre, littered with cryptic sound bites: “Did you know that neutrons can smile?”, “I think you are also just fiction” and the film’s mantra, “My eyes are cast down in awe.” The movie’s genesis is equally strange: based on a 1974 film by Herbst called DIE PHANTASTISCHE WELT DES MATTHEW MADSON, CATHEDRAL was finished after a decades-long gestation in 2006 (Herbst passed away in 2021.) One of the rarest and most obscure tiles in world animation and never before officially released on physical media, CATHEDRAL has been newly restored from the original camera negative and sound elements by Deaf Crocodile with the cooperation of Herbst’s wife, Renate Merck.

The.Cathedral.of.New.Emotions.2006.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 0 min
Size: 	1.61 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.212
Audio
#1:  	German 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 160 kb/s (Commentary by film historian Rolf Giesen)

https://nitro.download/view/4B3034810F6D84B/The.Cathedral.of.New.Emotions.2006.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):German, English
Subtitles:English

The post Helmut Herbst – Die Kathedrale der neuen Gefühle AKA The Cathedral of New Emotions (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

https://nitro.download/view/F2DF3654285152C/John_Heartfield.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/F66E0C7E218DA92/John_Heartfield.srt

Language(s):German
Subtitles:Swedish hard subs,English

The post Helmut Herbst – John Heartfield, Fotomonteur (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.