Themroc

This film is hilarious. It is inspiring. It captures the absurdity of everyday life in a repressive social order, and portrays the infectious poetic revolt of one man who "goes mad" against authority in every form.

It's interesting that the strategy of liberation in the film revolves around a very personal and playful attack on the architecture most immediate to our lives. This destruction and transformation of space is accompanied by a kind of sexual revolution, disrupting bourgeois family dynamics in a contagious way. Readers may recognize the resonance of these themes with the theory and agitation of the Situationist International, the revolutionary / avant-garde organization credited with sparking the revolt of May 1968 in France. Five years previous to Themroc's release, millions of people actually did occupy public spaces including universities and factories, creating "passionally superior ambiances" in many cases, armed to a significant extent with Situationist ideas, graffiti slogans from which plastered Paris.

Not that seeing Themroc is any substitute for actively engaging the rigorous revolutionary theory of the S.I. (see www.bopsecrets.org). But the film is in a way a dream-like rendition of the Situationist vision of changing life. And in fact, there is a passing reference to Themroc in "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?", a film by Situationist René Vienet: when the hero of that film is confronting the "bureaucrats", some onlookers comment something to the effect that "wow, that guy must have seen Themroc."

Themroc has been dumped on the market in the North West of England. The Warner Brothers VHS tape has appeared in dozens of copies in bargain outlets. So have Buñuel's Tristana and Visconti's Senso, come to that, but their transformative power may be less potent.

We still await reports that pound-store customers are roasting cops and sniffing tear-gas for kicks. As for humping their sisters, we never suspected anything less of them.

Warners promise English subtitles, which would have been de trop. Collectors of unusual aspect-ratios may care to note it is cited as 1.53:1

It's a romantic tale, though. The modern Themroc would be a short, stopped by a high- powered bullet about half an hour in.

It is obvious that words, wonderful photography, direction and profound lessons are not needed in a film in order for it to pass its messages across to its viewers. Themroc is a movie with no dialogue so that it can be seen by any human around the world and still understand how authority has separated us and divided us in order to use us. Themroc is an ode to symbolism, a prime example of how you can do political commentary and show to people that freedom is easy to attain and that half measures is the mean authority uses to control us. More than that, Themroc examines human sexuality, sexism, exploitation and the limitations modern society has set for us thus limiting our life experience and happiness.

I absolutely recommend watching it if you manage to fin this film. 10/10

I too watched this movie over 20 years ago - it was shown at the student film night at college in England. I loved it at the time and would like a chance to see it again.

I viewed it as an absurdist black comedy, but I'm sure the director had some serious socio-political axe to grind. I liked the fence painting scene and found the spit roasting of a cop (pig - geddit?) wonderfully tasteless

In a time when blind respect for anyone with the arrogance to call themselves an authority has reached plague proportions, we need to rediscover Claude Faraldo's anarchist assault Themroc as a matter of extreme urgency. Whether as a surrealistic revenge fantasy that makes Dirty Harry look like Kindergarden Cop or simply as one of the funniest films ever made, the film takes nothing seriously (least of all itself) as it sets out to outrage every convention of decent law abiding filmmaking ever unwritten. It's hard to choose just one pristine moment to symbolise this work - peraps the gendarme's blind pride in the stupidity of his uniform just before he becomes Themroc's latest meal; or possibly Michel Piccoli's curious assistance in his own death as his cave family are carefully walled in - but the work is blistering in its uncompromising joyous anti-logic. Commercial traditionalists like Bunuel may have made newer - even angrier - statements; but noone has ever revelled in their own extremism than Faraldo. The sooner it turns up on DVD, the better.