Dramatic short animation based on the song of the same name (“For You Armenia”/”Kez Hayastan”) composed by George Garvarents and performed by Charles Aznavour. The song is dedicated to the memory of the devastating earthquake that struck the Armenian region of the Soviet Union in 1988.
Category: Animation
Directed by Cannes-award winner Sándor Reisenbüchler, Holdmese is a psychedelic animated short that mixes pulp sci-fi, Tibetan mysticism and Slavic folklore. Two scientists propose that the moon is an ancient, derelict spaceship, and go on a journey through deep space to discover its origins. The influence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 is clear, but Reisenbüchler’s collage technique is distinctively- and irreverently- his own. Holdmese stands as a brilliant forgotten work of Communist animation.
An almost psychedelically luminous invocation of the Battle of Borodino set to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (1880). As Reisenbüchler put it: the film deals with “self-destruction in the power struggle for the conquest of empires”.
If you can read a face like a book, then here it is a book of poetry. Loose brushstrokes sketch a series of portraits of two faces, one male and one female, whilst the verse on the soundtrack tells the tale of both one and a thousand relationships. Alison de Vere was responsible for both the text and images, and the film was released in the same year she worked as a designer on the animated Beatles feature, Yellow Submarine.
With fast changing visuals and moods, an artist presents his family’s twentieth-century story. Although Stalin’s sour image is in the background, a boy’s childhood is a dreamlike world of colors and a butterfly. War interrupts youth and romance. Hitler, concentration camps, and conflagration finally give way to a mother and child (father is missing in the war), birds, beauty and more butterflies. The child grows. Pop culture arrives from America, but the grim shadow of Stalinism remains. The artist leaves to study in the West. Art, animation, sex, and love nourish him. He earns a diploma!
Too fast a pace of life in overcrowded, noisy and polluted cities make people sick, neuroses is a common occurrence. A man is trying to sleep but noises keep him up. Trying to stop the noise he reveals a bizarre mixture of sounds and images. The film explores what can happen to a man irritated by noise when all he wants is to peacefully read his newspaper. From being peaceful the man turns dangerous. He is ready to destroy.
This ecologically-minded film builds on the contrasts of idyllic, untouched nature and small communities versus the world of rigid, faceless, gigantic machine monstrosities. This film that was created at the time of mass demonstrations against the levelling of Transylvanian villages and the barrage system on the Danube in the late 1980s was inspired by the novel Farewell to Matyora by Valentin Rasputin about a Siberian village flooded because of the construction of a hydroelectric power station.
A young boy and girl, dressed in costumes based on Dutch traditional clothes, find their idyllic, windmill-laden countryside is being over-run by unfeeling, unthinking mechanical men that lay waste to everything in their path. The cartoon (note the title) was a very thinly veiled propaganda film in support of the Netherlands resistance fighters during Nazi occupation in World War 2 (The film was completed when Nazi Germany had completely occupied the Netherlands).