Join us on Wednesday, February 2 at 6 pm for a screening of René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet. With the 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the phrase “down the rabbit hole” became shorthand for the experience of slipping into a bizarre, alternate reality. With his playful treatment of scale and material expectations, artist Tristin Lowe’s work evokes a sense of parallel world weirdness. Held in conjunction with Lowe's exhibition Black Holes & Rabbit Holes, this series of screenings invites revelatory disorientation with four films that open portals into strange wonderlands.
ABOUT THE FILM
Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence.
Additional screenings include:
