Cathode Cinema presents ANIMATION VORTEX ft. THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS!

Cathode Cinema – the expertly curated nightly online film fest – takes the helm for The Animation Freakout Hangout’s final event, guiding us into the deepest reaches of animated weirdness, straight into the . . . ANIMATION VORTEX!

Once caught inside, we’ll find their curated preshow of psyched-out toons, obscure claymation, and mind-expanding animation oddities—a trip through the weird, the surreal, and the forgotten, before venturing even farther out for our finale of the previously nearly lost and unknown, recently rediscovered and restored, and utterly bonkers psychedelic animated oddity THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS!

CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS

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 eventually 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, CATHEDRAL has been newly restored from the original camera negative and sound elements by Deaf Crocodile Films with the cooperation of Herbst’s wife, Renate Merck.

Dir. Helmut Herbst, 2006, 60 min, German with English subtitles, Digital.

Special thanks to Dennis Bartok and Craig Rogers of Deaf Crocodile Films and to Bret Berg of American Genre Film Archive.

This event is suitable for adult audiences only.

ABOUT CATHODE CINEMA

Cathode Cinema is a Los Angeles + New York based curatorial screening collective showcasing contemporary and archival experimental film/animation. Tune in at cathodetv.com!

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

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Host or Publisher The Philosophical Research Society