Dir: Erich Breuer
Star: Axel Jodorowsky, Nastassja Kinski

This 17-minute short film took three years to produce, with over 20,000 images being manipulated to create the animation, with no computer effects. It’s part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. What’s it about? I told you: it’s about 17 minutes. You want more? For safety, I think I will defer the synopsis listed in the IMDb, as being more likely accurate than anything with which I could come up.

On stormy night in an ugly urban landscape, Ciro Norte (Jodorowsky), a scientist with wild hair and thick glasses, straps himself to a chair he’s has fashioned with wires: lightening strikes, convulsing him. It seems his experiment has not worked. The next day, he drives his jalopy to a bar, sits alone, and weeps. But suddenly, a vortex sucks him into a dream state where he wanders, escapes man-eating fish, confronts his doppelganger, walks through a field of giant flowers, and comes upon Venus herself (Kinski), buried up to her shoulders in sand. She is a giant, and she takes him to her breast. He wakes from the vortex, back in the bar, his mood transformed.

Yeah, it’s kinda like that. Jodorowsky is the son of infamous film-maker Alexander Jodorowsky, maker of impenetrable cult epic El Topo (as well as the somewhat more accessible Santa Sangre, which starred Axel). Jodorowsky Sr was also at one point during the seventies, working on an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which would certainly have been… interesting. There’s a sense of the same surrealist approach here, though Breuer is perhaps equally inspired by the works of German expressionist cinema such as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. This may be simply a result of the black and white, siilent approach Breuer uses in the early going. Things get a lot more colorful, once Norte is sucked through into the other world – as an aside, I didn’t particularly get the impression it was a dream state, it felt more like another dimension [with Norte being chased by giant, predatory fish creatures, I got more of a From Beyond vibe, to be honest]

Quite how or why this becomes Attack of the 50-foot Nastassja, I’m not sure, and I would clarify that the “takes him to her breast” mentioned is intended as much in a spiritual sense, fitting in with her character being Venus, the goddess of love. It’s an odd if memorable piece of work, working much better as a visual tour de force, than anything resembling narrative coherence, and is best approached in that manner, as a 17-minute helping of eye-candy. That running time probably represents the limit of my attention span for this kind of thing, and I’ll confess to having checked a couple of times here to see how much longer there was left to go: a feature-length movie in this style would be hard pounding indeed. Mind you, I never liked El Topo either. The film is, for now, available on Vimeo, and has been embedded below. Your mileage may vary…