To really appreciate this one, I had to go back and watch it a second time.
It’s one of those films: it is so strange and unique, that it is hard to absorb all at once.
But that’s not a bad thing.
I’ve seen quite a bit of animation from behind the Iron Curtain: while, thanks largely to Walt Disney, animation is seen as something for children here, in Russia and Eastern Europe, particularly during the Sixties and Seventies, it developed in a very different direction, with incredible experiments in both form and content.
However, even by that standard, Holdmese is strange and utterly unique.
After all, we’re talking about a bright and extremely colorful, largely abstract, collage animation…which has been compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It is also a film you experience more than comprehend, a dazzling series of images whose significance would be almost impossible to grasp without the guidance of a few title cards. The titles tell us first of the real-life theory of two scientists, Mihail Vaszin and Aleskszandr Shcherbakov, who believed that the moon was an artificial construct, a giant, derelict spaceship which came from a distant world, and then of the old Slavic legends and the Tibetan belief that the moon had not always been there: instead it appeared long after the rise of the human race.
While some of the images are very clear and specific, with familiar shapes collaged together with familiar images and one famous UFO photograph casually thrown in for an instant or two, they are often made of other, completely unrelated pieces, and are interspersed with things that seem more random. It starts with an image or two of spaceships and the moon, and then moves to Tibet where, in the midst of a huge ceremony, the doors of the magical moon gate slide open and we start a kaleidoscopic trip across time and endless reaches of space, back to the alien race that built the moon and their incredible workshops.
The story moves on from there, and we see the Moon’s original mission, exploration, and, ultimately, the end of our Sun and the next step from there.
It’s more of an outline than a story, but the scope is breathtaking, the images incredible, and yet it is all conveyed by indirectly, by images which make sense because we know what they mean.
It’s a very strange approach to storytelling.
The result is impressive, and decidedly psychedelic. Sándor Reisenbüchler did not direct many films, but from what I’ve seen he used abstract or simplified designs, wild colors, collage, and narrative counterpoint in all of them.
And it is backed by a strong score, heavy on classical music, which is itself a collage of different themes and pieces, taken from a variety of sources.
I’m not sure how many people noticed what he was doing at the time, but he did win an award at the Cannes film festival.
Holdmese isn’t for everyone. You have to absorb the imagery on one hand, and yet, on the other, think about what you are seeing, and let your imagination see how even simple shapes, cut from miss-matched materials, can suddenly transcend their formlessness.
And, at twelve minutes long, there is no reason not to watch the film, no reason not to experience it for yourself and let your mind free in Reisenbüchler’s dizzying universe of color and sound…
Although you may need to watch it twice…
(Complete film available here)
(My thanks to Jon Whitehead of Rarefilmm.com for bringing Holdmese to my attention!)
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