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Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982,
UK)
In Alan Parker's cultish, downbeat re-imagining of
the Pink Floyd album, a musical "free form video" masterpiece
- a remarkable descent into madness and insanity through a series
of rambling music video segments by burned-out and depressed rock
singer Pink (Bob Geldorf) in a Los Angeles hotel room, mostly mindlessly
watching TV - he constructed a physical and metaphorical protective
wall around himself after the death of his father as he experienced
flashbacks of his life and attempted to tear down the wall:
- in the animated and nightmarish
"Goodbye Blue Sky," a dove imploded and morphed into a
dark monstrous bird of prey -- a fighter plane bomber over London
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"Goodbye Blue Sky"
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"In the Flesh"
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Crossed Marching Hammers
in "Waiting For the Worms"
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- in "In the Flesh", Pink envisioned himself
as an eyebrowless, racist, fascist Hitler-like leader of a Nuremberg-like
rally (with a skinhead chorus) of faceless followers, symbolized
by crossed arms and fists, while in the musical "Waiting for
the Worms" animated segment, cartoon hammers rhythmically
marched (or goose-stepped) down bombed out streets and ruins
- in the ugly segment "Another Brick in the Wall,
Part 2," marching schoolchildren were turned into faceless,
conforming zombies on an assembly line within an oppressive school
system, seated at desks or plodding along, before being fed into
an approaching meat-grinder, ultimately they rioted, threw off their
masks, and rebelled against their authoritarian education
"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2"
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- there were 15 minutes of memorable,
adult-themed animation that appeared periodically during the film
by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe (including symbolic, sexually-explicit,
botanical Freudian animation). It was one of the first truly adult
animated work in terms of maturity - sexually and politically.
One segment presented a misogynistic woman-as-destroyer/devourer
motif. In the passionate "flowers" scene before the rock
song
"Empty Spaces," two flowers, one shaped like a male organ
and the other like a female organ -- morphed into a couple having
intercourse and then engaged in a bloody fight when the female flower
revealed sharp teeth and devoured the male
- in the concluding trial sequence (with Pink on trial,
and portrayed as a rag doll within his cinderblock wall), a giant
creature named Judge Arse, who appeared to be a giant set of buttocks
(topped with a wig) that talked out of his anus in a kangaroo courtroom
scene; finally ordered and yelled out: "Tear down the wall" -
and the brick wall exploded into many fragments to liberate Pink
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The Wall
The Pain
Gerald Scarfe's Botanical Act of Intercourse and Devourment
"The Trial" - with Judge Arse
The Exploding Wall
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