The trip movie doesn’t get much play anymore. Too many people want plot and reality when they go to the movie theater. They don’t want to sit in the the theater, take some form of mind altering refreshments (which could be beer, wine or something more) and just let the weirdness on the screen take over. The trip films often ran at midnight on the weekends at the local art house starting in the ’60s. Most of the audience was already in the proper state of mind when they bought the extra large tub of popcorn to feed their munchies. The Cathedral of New Emotions came out in 2006 when the midnight movies had ceased to be an art house thing outside of Rocky Horror. This is a shame since Helmut Herbst’s animated movie from Germany is a perfectly trippy movie about the oddest crew to ever blast off into outer space.
In 1972, eight people communally living in a West Berlin apartment sign a contract that put them into space on a ship that’s a giant hand holding a storage container. The front window has a giant wiper blade so they can have a look at the stars and incoming interstellar objects and lifeforms. They accidentally run into Mighty Mouse. While they’ve been floating for space for decades, commune members haven’t aged a day. They all seem a bit confused about what exactly they are supposed to be doing on this mission. This confusion might be their natural state whether in space or Earthbound. It seems they were pretty high when they signed the contract with a visitor to their apartment. Things get weird as the characters shift forms. The backgrounds are constantly in motion. Nothing is stable in their lives. Their voices get more robotic sounding are they becoming one with the spaceship? There is a sense that they are somehow supposed to meet a man called Matthew Madison. They believe that the extra hairy Madison is creating the Cathedral of the New Emotions. Is that where they are going or are they really just tripping out in their commune abode back in West Berlin?
The Cathedral of New Emotions is the perfect trippy Midnight movie. The space location gets everything extra spacey on the screen. It’s an hour long so you don’t have to worry about your buzz wearing off before the movie is over. The story joyfully embraces absurdism in plot, dialogue and visuals. The film has great little comic moments that work so well within the larger bizarre settings. Director Helmut Herbst uses several animation techniques in the creation of the film. A large part of it appears to be rotoscoped such as when the commune members talks with each other and deal with their peculiar situation in deep space. Having lived in West Germany in 1972 and recently watched my family’s home movies from that time; I can attest that the hairstyles of the commune are authentic to the period. There is also live action footage worked into the animation that seems to be members of the voice cast. When Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, one of the posters declared the film “The Ultimate Trip.” The Cathedral of New Emotions is “The Sublime Trip.”
The Video is 1.78:1 anamorphic. The transfer is clean so you can see the way Herbst animated his characters and colored his backgrounds. The Audio is DTS-HD MA 5.1 in German. You can hear the space as the characters come to term to their life in the stars. The movie is subtitled in English.
‘Container Interstellar’ (7:20) is the short by Helmut Herbst from 2001 that led to the feature film of The Cathedral of New Emotions in 2006. Many of the shots were reused in the bigger version.
Werkinterview Filmkunst: Helmut Herbst (26:07) is a German television special from 2013 directed by Anja Ellenberger. We are welcomed inside Herbst’s studio space for an interview that covers his career as a filmmaker. We see his work when he created promos for West German’s NDR television station in the ’60s. He talks about how him and his partner improvised their animation at that time. I get a sense that Herbst is the German version of Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam. He gets into how the photo collages of John Heartfield influenced his work as he took the technique into animation. The conversation comes around to his Dada documentary and how much the movement meant to him as an artist. There are clips from the documentary.
New commentary track by film historian Rolf Giesen. He talks about how there’s no real German animation industry. It’s mostly independent filmmakers. He gets into Helmut Herbst role in animation in Germany and influence on others. Helmut Herbst passed away in 2021 at age 86.
Downcast Eyes: Dada and Metamorphosis in The Cathedral of New Emotions (18:12) is a video essay by experimental filmmaker and film scholar Stephen Broomer. He ties together the Dada movement with the work of Helmut Herbst. The art movement was a response to the nightmares of World War I. Herbst has a direct tie since he made the amazing documentary Germany-Dada for TV. Herbst used his art to attack politics of his time. Broomer sees this final film as a culmination of Herbst’s work and themes. There are clips of Herbst’s earlier works within the essay. We learn that some of the live action footage including Herbst as one character was actually shot in 1972 West Germany.
Deaf Crocodile presents The Cathedral of New Emotions. Directed by Helmut Herbst. Screenplay by Helmut Herbst & Klaus Wyborny. Running Time: 61 minutes. Rating: Not Rated. Release Date: June 10, 2025.
In case you are curious, here is Helmut Herbst’s Germany-Dada documentary:
