Une nuit sur le mont chauve

Lyrical, dark, exceptionally interesting animated film. Occasionally charmingly inarticulate but some very special images here. Inspiring work from an early woman director. Saw it last night as part of the Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941 series playing here in Austin. See it if you get a chance.

flipping channels, late at night, stumbled upon this obscure gem. i have been around a few blocks in my time, and this has to be one of the strangest, eeriest flicks i have ever seen. morphing, 3-dimensional shapes, bizarre and addicting. i want to buy this but can't find it anywhere. what tim burton would have done had he been alive in the thirties.

About a year ago, I saw a short film from Canada called Le PAYSAGISTE. It was made completely by the pinscreen process where little pinholes were painstakingly made in fabric in order to create an animated picture. I was mesmerized by this film from 1976 and no idea that the film maker had actually NOT created the process and that Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker had perfected the process over 40 years earlier with UNE NUIT SUR LE MONT CHAUVE.

Both films are quite lovely to look at but aren't exactly the style of animation that most people would love. It's extremely artistic but not commercially entertaining to the average audience. In an art museum it would play well, but for a group of kids or average theater goers, it's unlikely they'd enjoy the rather artsy style. I liked it quite a bit, though I admit it isn't something I'd like to see every day.

I've always enjoyed the music of Mussorgsky. This is a challenging piece. If only the quality of the print were better. Some of the more significant events were badly muted by age. Not too many years later, Disney approached the same piece and made it more slick. I didn't know this little film even existed.

ever wondered why the BEEP Walt Disney made such a horrific sequence at the end of Fantasia? well, don't hesitate to watch Une Nuit sur le Mont chauve, because everything you thought was scary about that animated Disney sequence will now be altered in a real life short movie. here we see games with the death and corpses and witches more than the devil on the mountain himself. it's quite frightening, to be exact. it surely scared the hell out of me (really). the music and the nonstop animation with puppets go to an extreme corporation together, while they blend in a lot of troubling scout camp teachers and fire woods from the depths of hell. you want to be scared? go watch this short movie, it will change your definition of horror movies completely.