Marc Campbell’s post yesterday on the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary—he was even more effusive in his praise of the film on the phone—reminded me of something that I wanted to post here:

Before their collaboration on the classic 1973 animated sci-fi feature, Fantastic Planet, René Laloux and Roland Topor made “Les Escargots,” (“The Snails”) an exquisite stop-frame animated short in 1965. (If the Jodorowsky link isn’t clear, in the early 1960s, Fernando Arrabal, Roland Topor and Jodorowsky mounted entrail-covered Hermann Nitsch-like theatrical performance art happenings as “the Panic Movement” in Paris.)

Here’s how IMDB describes this little-known mini-masterpiece:

A gardener tries his best to make his salad plants grow. It is only when he cries that his tears finally water the field and the salads grow huge. The incredible size attracts a multitude of snails that quickly become giant too, causing disasters and panic in the nearby city.

I think that about says it all… The film’s message is a bit ambiguous, as you’ll see. “Les Escargots” won Special Jury Prize at the Cracow Film Festival.

Fun facts: Roland Topor wrote the novel of the same title that Roman Polanski’s creepy as fuck psychological thriller, The Tenant was based on and he played the role of “Renfield” in Werner Herzog’s movie Nosferatu the Vampyre.
 

 
The year before “Les Escargots,” René Laloux and Roland Topor collaborated on “Les Temps Morts” (“Dead Times”) an anti-war meditation on what it means to be human.
 

 
In the early 1960s, Alejandro Jodorowsky, in collaboration with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, produced theatrical happenings that were part Grand Guignol, part Theater Of Cruelty and, in the case of splatterfests like Melodrama Sacramental, something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre on peyote. Calling themselves the Panic Movement, the three provocateurs attempted to shatter the fourth wall with more than just words and gestures - they were going for something more visceral: blood and guts - anything to close the distance between spectacle and spectator and to wake and alert the audience to the suffering, inequality and untruths engulfing them in this modern world gone mad. Yes, life stinks and so should art. The Panic Movement put the “fart” in artsy fartsy - a steaming turd in the cosmic punchbowl.

Jodorowsky and company’s sacramental melodrama was staged in Paris, May of 1965, the same month and year that the largest Vietnam teach-in was held (May 21–23, 1965) at UC Berkeley, one of the seminal events in the history of the American anti-war movement, the first rumblings of a protest movement against the Vietnam war that would grow to a deafening roar. Was Jodorowsky’s “happening”  also a a mirroring of the savagery of war and a metaphor for the lives being sacrificed in Vietnam? Were the prophets of peace in synch and sending signals to each other from two epicenters of radical change?

In Melodrama Sacramental we see images that would be repeated in Jodorowsky’s epic mindfucker El Topo, another nightmare ode to man’s inhumanity to man.

On the soundtrack we hear Allen Ginsberg reading from his poem “Lysergic Acid,” written in San Francisco in 1959.