Cathedral of New Emotions, The: Limited Deluxe Edition (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Feb 18, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Helmut HerbstRelease Date(s)
2006 (January 14, 2025)Studio(s)
Deaf Crocodile Films- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
The Cathedral of New Emotions (aka Die Kathedrale der neuen Gefühle) is a psychedelic animated spectacle that may seem inspired by the likes of relatively mainstream films like Yellow Submarine, Belladonna of Sadness, Fantastic Planet, and Heavy Metal, but the roots of its surrealistic imagery lie much deeper than that. Cathedral was the final project created by Helmut Herbst, a true multimedia artist who worked in with live action, animation, collage, and other techniques. He was strongly influenced by the Dada movement, and even documented it for German television in 1969 with DADA-Manifest – DA DA – ein Alphabet des deutschen Dadaismus (aka DADA Manifesto – DA DA – an Alphabet of German Dadaism). The surrealistic nature of Dada was never an end unto itself, but rather a deconstructive act of political protest. Herbst was also influenced by the pioneers of Expanded Cinema like Jordan Belson and John Whitney, who reduced animation into purely abstract form. There’s even a touch of Stan Brakhage to Herbst, at least in terms of the way that he plasticized the film medium itself. Yet Herbst rarely worked with pure abstraction, although he did abstract reality to a level far beyond the likes of Yellow Submarine or Belladonna of Sadness.
The Cathedral of New Emotion is an expanded version of Herbst’s animated 2001 short Container Interstellar, which set up the basic situation of a German commune that’s been travelling through the stars ever since 1972. Yet it’s also based loosely on Herbst’s 1974 live action collage film The Fantastic World of Matthew Madson (aka Die Phantastische Welt Des Matthew Madson), and it even incorporates footage from that film (although exactly how is a bit of a mystery, since Matthew Madson is nearly impossible to view these days). Describing the actual narrative of The Cathedral of New Emotions is a bit of a fool’s errand, not because there isn’t one, but because it doesn’t really matter. The Cathedral of New Emotions is best experienced, not interpreted. It’s a LeMarchand puzzle box, opening doors to other dimensions while simultaneously keeping its secrets tightly locked within itself.
Yet the choice of an interstellar commune as the setting for The Cathedral of New Emotions is significant, because it provided the opportunity for Herbst to explore sexuality in all of its forms, delving into gender fluidity and even body horror. While the residents of this spacecraft (that really isn’t a spacecraft) never age as they travel throughout the galaxy, their bodies are constantly transmogrified. Traveling near a black hole results in them being reduced to amorphous blobs, only to reform later and repeat the cycle for all eternity. Yet they’re stuck in the past, still trying to figure out who ended up winning the Vietnam War. They’ve also reached a state of “erotic tedium,” which is finally broken up by the arrival of gender-fluid twins named James and Jones (maybe, anyway), and they take a literal mulligan when they discover an amnesiac named, well, Mulligan, passed out in their supply rocket.
Herbst did indeed treat the entire film medium as plastic, employing a variety of techniques in order to create his surrealistic effects, so it’s hardly surprising that he treated the human body the same manner. All of the bodies in The Cathedral of New Emotions are plasticized, becoming just another element in his collage as a whole. Herbst even literalizes the term “blowjob” at one point by having a character inflated orally like a balloon and then released to flit around the room, like the beach ball alien in Dark Star, until he’s finally well and truly spent. However much these characters may reminisce about a bygone era back on Earth, they’ve become divorced from their own humanity. Herbst even treated their voices using Logox SpeechBox software in order to give them all a robotic monotone that mirrors the monotonous nature of their existence. While there’s a bit of scoring in the film, their voices become the true music that provides the dissonant harmonies that drive this dehumanized version of humanity.
Intriguingly, the mysterious nature of The Cathedral of New Emotions extends to its production. Helmut Herbst tended to work alone, and the techniques that he used aren’t entirely obvious. While it’s been widely reported that he used CTP-Pro animation software in order to create the final results, the reality appears to be that he primarily worked with hand-drawn and cutout elements that he photographed and animated on a traditional film-based animation stand. According to his daughter Kathrin, he built his own scanner in order to digitize this film footage. Aside from the obvious live-action element taken from The Fantastic World of Matthew Madson, exactly how Herbst utilized footage from the rest of that film isn’t quite so clear. His son Moritz has implied that he may have rotoscoped elements, while his friend Klaus Wyborny thinks that he redrew everything by hand instead. So, like the film itself, Herbst’s production pipeline for The Cathedral of New Emotions is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Best guess: Nearly all of the animation was done by hand and shot on film; then scanned into his computer and edited/massaged using CTP-Pro software; then scanned back out to film in order to create the final photochemical negative.
Just like fellow Expanded Cinema animation pioneers, Helmut Herbst did work alone, and he developed most of his techniques in his workshop while building on what others had done before him. His methodologies have now passed away along with the man himself (Herbst died in 2021). While it’s fascinating to try to analyze how he crafted what he did, we’ll only ever have small glimpses of the man behind the curtain. All cinematic art is magick in one form or another, bringing still images to life in a way that redeems the physical reality that lies behind them (to paraphrase Siegfried Kracauer), and yet they end up creating an alternate reality of their own. In some respects, animation is the pinnacle of these magicks. While it’s natural to want to understand how tricks work, sometimes it’s best just to appreciate illusions for what they are. Sit back, relax, and let the Wizard guide you through The Cathedral of New Emotions to destinations unknown.
This version of The Cathedral of New Emotions is based on a 2K scan of the final negative (although keep in mind that in this case, the negative was actually a dupe element), with digital cleanup and grading performed by Craig Rodgers at Deaf Crocodile. There’s some minor cel dirt still visible, but that should have been left alone anyway, and everything else looks clean aside from a few visible scratches during the closing animation/live action collage (though once again, those were probably baked into the opticals). The pastel colors are all reproduced accurately, and while the image sometimes looks flat and low-contrast, that’s by design. In other words, this version of The Cathedral of New Emotions looks exactly like it should. It’s beautiful, it its own peculiar Dada-esque fashion. (Be forewarned that The Cathedral of New Emotions does make repeated use of flashing imagery, so anyone sensitive to such things should proceed with caution.)
Audio is offered in German 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English and English SDH subtitles. While much of the soundstage is naturally focused on the front channels, it’s still a creative mix that makes full use of the immersive capabilities of multichannel audio. A fly that’s annoying one of the characters ends up circling around the viewer when it’s offscreen, and the results of the Dark Star punchline also zip around the main listening position in appropriate fashion. Yet the music and the music of the electronic voices remains the primary focus, and they’re both reproduced perfectly in this version.
The Deaf Crocodile Limited Deluxe Edition Blu-ray release of The Cathedral of New Emotions includes a 60-page booklet featuring essays by Alex McDonald and Walter Chaw. Everything comes housed in a rigid slipcase featuring artwork by Beth Morris. There’s also a card tucked inside with a QR code that can be scanned in order to access transcribed versions of the bonus content. Note that Deaf Crocodile is also offering a Standard Edition that omits the booklet and the slipcase, although it still includes the QR code. The following extras are included, all of them in HD:
- Audio Commentary by Rolf Geisen
- Container Interstellar (7:20)
- Downcast Eyes: Dada and Metamorphosis in The Cathedral of New Emotions (18:12)
- Werkinterview Filmkunst: Helmut Herbst (26:07)
The commentary features Rolf Geisen, former visiting professor of animation at the University of China and author of numerous works on animation. He opens by stating firmly that The Cathedral of New Emotions can only be viewed, not explained, so he doesn’t even try. Instead, he traces the history of German animation from its inception, including the influence of Dada artists like Viking Eggeling. Eventually, he works his way to Helmut Herbst, covering the filmmaker’s career and explaining what he can about the technology that he used to create The Cathedral of New Emotions (both in terms of audio and video). He also explains the film’s origins in the obscure The Fantastic World of Matthew Madison, which he admits that he hasn’t seen in forty years. Geisen can be a bit challenging to follow for English-speaking listeners (he apologizes up from for his “Pidgin English,” and apologizes again at the end,) but it’s worth putting the effort into digesting what he has to say.
Container Interstellar is the 2001 short by Herbst that formed the foundation for The Cathedral of New Emotions five years later. It sets up the same basic situation and characters (such as they are), but it offers the unadulterated voices of the actors before Herbst distorted them electronically for the expanded film. Like The Cathedral of New Emotions, it’s also been digitally restored from the original 35mm film elements, though in this case with German 2.0 stereo LPCM.
Downcast Eyes: Dada and Metamorphosis in The Cathedral of New Emotions is a visual essay by historian/filmmaker Stephen Broomer. He traces the development of Dada and its influence on Herbst, and he also demonstrates how The Cathedral of New Emotions found its roots in The Fantastic World of Matthew Madson. Broomer says that Dada was an act of resistance against the dehumanization of modern warfare, a mobilization of modern art in order to combat fascism. He traces how Herbst deconstructed the imagery of science fiction in accordance with those principles—metamorphosis becomes a metaphor. It’s an act of protest that’s conscious of its own futility.
Finally, Werkinterview Filmkunst: Helmut Herbst is a 2013 documentary on the artist that was produced for German television. It mixes an interview with Herbst with clips from his work, and he also demonstrates a few of the animation techniques that he used throughout his career. Herbst saw himself not as a specialist, animator, or even a filmmaker, but rather as a universalist. For him, the abstraction of animation led to freedom. Yet he admits that he was fortunate to have been given relative artistic freedom throughout his career, even though some of his Dada work had to be produced with the assistance of American financing (there was something of a backlash against Dada in Germany). It’s a fascinating portrait of a fascinating artist.
It’s also a fascinating disc, full stop. Deaf Crocodile has been doing the Lord’s work in recovering obscure international animation and fantasy filmmaking (and even a few homegrown bits of Americana like Solomon King). Helmut Herbst may be the most unseen of all, as The Cathedral of New Emotions has never been released on physical media in any format before now. That fact alone makes it worthy of adding to any animation collection, let alone thanks to the value-added content (the documentary in particular). Now, if only Deaf Crocodile could get their hands on the only extant 16mm print of The Fantastic World of Matthew Madson, then we’ll really be cooking with gas (boxed set, anyone?) In the meantime, though, this disc remains highly recommended.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).