Cinema

(de voertaal van deze avond is Engels).

Jeffrey's Underground Cinema has been showing neglected and forgotten films for the last decade. This night:  

FANTASTIC PLANET   1973

(La Planète sauvage)
Directed by Rene Laloux
72 minutes
In French with English subtitles

This mesmerizing psychedelic sci-fi classic is absolutely spellbinding, and knocks modern animation techniques out of the ballpark. Today we live in a world that is being manufactured, and the power of poetry is being lost. It becomes clear that this analog style of animation actually reveals a kind of beauty that is extremely rare these days with computer generated movement. In fact, this Czech-French co-production took a painstaking five years to complete the drawings by hand and make them move.

Fantastic Planet tells the story of human-like creatures who are kept as domestic pets by an alien race of blue giants called “draags.” Is this our planet or another? Is it set in the past or the future? Everything about this film is left open to the imagination and interpretation. The biggest quality of the film is that it is profoundly disorienting… it keeps us suspended in an overall feeling of other-worldliness. 

Some people that I’ve talked to that have seen this film, have told me they were spellbound by it, dreaming about its strangeness for years. It transports the viewer into a world that is a bit like entering a delirious Hieronymus Bosch painting. It also has a trippy 70s prog-rock soundtrack by Alain Goraguer who also composed music for Serge Gainsbourg.

This cult-classic, created along with surrealist illustrator Roland Topor, still remains a landmark of European animation. Fantastic Planet won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973.

With a short introduction by Jeffrey Babcock

20:30 (doors and bar open at 20:00)
Free entrance / no reservations