This film is hilarious. It is inspiring. It captures the absurdity of everyday life in a repressive social order, and portrays the infectious poetic revolt of one man who "goes mad" against authority in every form.It's interesting that the strategy of liberation in the film revolves around a very personal and playful attack on the architecture most immediate to our lives. This destruction and transformation of space is accompanied by a kind of sexual revolution, disrupting bourgeois family dynamics in a contagious way. Readers may recognize the resonance of these themes with the theory and agitation of the Situationist International, the revolutionary / avant-garde organization credited with sparking the revolt of May 1968 in France. Five years previous to Themroc's release, millions of people actually did occupy public spaces including universities and factories, creating "passionally superior ambiances" in many cases, armed to a significant extent with Situationist ideas, graffiti slogans from which plastered Paris.Not that seeing Themroc is any substitute for actively engaging the rigorous revolutionary theory of the S.I. (see www.bopsecrets.org). But the film is in a way a dream-like rendition of the Situationist vision of changing life. And in fact, there is a passing reference to Themroc in "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?", a film by Situationist René Vienet: when the hero of that film is confronting the "bureaucrats", some onlookers comment something to the effect that "wow, that guy must have seen Themroc."
... View MoreIn a time when blind respect for anyone with the arrogance to call themselves an authority has reached plague proportions, we need to rediscover Claude Faraldo's anarchist assault Themroc as a matter of extreme urgency. Whether as a surrealistic revenge fantasy that makes Dirty Harry look like Kindergarden Cop or simply as one of the funniest films ever made, the film takes nothing seriously (least of all itself) as it sets out to outrage every convention of decent law abiding filmmaking ever unwritten. It's hard to choose just one pristine moment to symbolise this work - peraps the gendarme's blind pride in the stupidity of his uniform just before he becomes Themroc's latest meal; or possibly Michel Piccoli's curious assistance in his own death as his cave family are carefully walled in - but the work is blistering in its uncompromising joyous anti-logic. Commercial traditionalists like Bunuel may have made newer - even angrier - statements; but noone has ever revelled in their own extremism than Faraldo. The sooner it turns up on DVD, the better.
... View MoreI saw this movie back in the seventies and I can't forget it.This movie rules. I must be the best film I have ever seen. We are all animals, even if we chose to think of ourselves as something more divine than a common ape. Watch this movie and open your eyes.
... View MoreI do not know why, but in my opinion this movie is the best i have ever seen...watch IT !!!
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