Astronautes, Les
Entry updated 14 January 2024. Tagged: Film.
French short animated film (1959). Directed by Walerian Borowczyk in collaboration with Chris Marker. Produced by Anatole Dauman. Cast includes Michel Bochet, Ligia Branice and Philippe Lifschitz. 14 minutes. Black and white.
A Scientist builds a Spaceship with a periscope, which he uses first to spy on a woman undressing, then to travel into space. After encountering a giant human (see Great and Small), he becomes involved in a battle between two other spaceships. When he has helped to save the smaller ship it then turns on him and he is blasted back to earth.
This collaboration between two soon-to-be celebrated directors has much more in common with Borowczyk's subsequent work than with Marker's. The cut-out animation, including actors and objects appearing as still images, is used in a lighter vein than his later films, though not without an undercurrent of menace. What was later to become outright fetishism is here witty, with hats standing in for planets and a very home-made spacecraft. Les Astronautes now plays as an irreverent homage to Georges Méliès's sf films, and clearly influenced Terry Gilliam's animations. [CWa]
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