Tribute to Phil Mulloy

L’Étrange Festival had to pay tribute to this animation genius who prematurely passed away last July 10th. Mulloy, who was an immense experimental British animator, imposed a unique visual style with its Chinese skeleton shadow figures, with the background sceneries showing through their empty eye sockets.. He used animation as a vast satirical canvas, fearlessly skewering social injustice, bourgeois hypocrisy, religion, all of human nature’s flaws. He will be missed.

Goodbye Mister Christie

Phil Mulloy

  • 2010
  • United Kingdom
  • 1h17mn
  • Original version with French subtitles
  • Color
Following his anthology The Christies, this first feature film by the filmmaker, is the second installment of a trilogy about this typical bourgeois British family, hiding its degeneration beneath their posh veneer.
Sentimental outbursts, subtitled barkings of the dog, insults by the patriarch: the synthetic robotic voices, toneless and without expression, somewhere between Laurie Anderson and a Philip Glass opera, contribute to the strange anguishing and repetitive atmosphere evoking contemporary sanitization pushed to a hellish degree. With his French sailor’s whistling that attracts every member of the family into his bed, Mulloy sort of signs his own Theorem. Sea, Sex and God: Mulloy, whose cruelty reigns supreme, has no taboos, vomiting universal obscenity through his characters, each of them more repulsive than the last.

Credits

  • Voiceover by : Phil Mulloy
  • Screenplay : Phil Mulloy
  • Photography : Phil Mulloy
  • Editing : Sui Devan
  • Music by : Gary Challenger
  • Production : Spectre Films

Screenings

12/09 • 14h30 • Screen 500
Session presented by Manuel Attali