The Cathedral Of New Emotions Blu-ray presents one of the most surreal, psychedelic, and genuinely cosmic animated features ever created. Often mentioned alongside Belladonna Of Sadness and Fantastic Planet, Helmut Herbst’s hallucinatory cult film follows a drifting commune of Berlin stoners and intellectuals who are launched into space inside a packing container clutched by a giant flying hand, beginning a descent into political malaise, sexual inertia, and existential disorientation.
 
Set adrift in 1972, the crew’s journey unfolds as a nonstop barrage of dream logic and visual delirium: colossal insects collide with their windshield, pop culture phantoms drift through space, Krautrock drones echo with disembodied questioning, and bodies morph, dissolve, and reassemble as they pass through black holes. The film blends countercultural satire, cosmic absurdity, and radical animation techniques into a truly singular space freakout, evoking comparisons to Ralph Bakshi at his most unhinged or an animated, R-rated inversion of John Carpenter’s Dark Star.
 
Long considered one of the rarest titles in world animation and never before officially released on physical media, The Cathedral Of New Emotions has been newly restored from the original camera negative and sound elements by Deaf Crocodile. Presented here in German with English subtitles, this Blu-ray finally gives Herbst’s singular vision the release it has always deserved.
 
directed by: Helmut Herbst
2006 / 60 min / 1.33:1 / German stereo