Breathdeath1963

NEWLY RESTORED (NFPF)
Prints courtesy of the VanDerBeek Estate

Dedicated to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. A surrealistic fantasy based on the 15th century woodcuts of the dance of the dead. A film experiment that deals with the photoreality and the surrealism of life. It is a collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing a harp in the middle of a battlefield?) with the inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks at death ... a parabolic parable. Awards: Bell Telephone Prize; Third Experimental Film Competition, Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, 1964; Midwest Film Festival, 1964; Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1964.