The Big Departure

This is the sole feature film directed by the renowned French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the era’s revolutionary spirit, the work dispenses with a conventional plot and appears largely improvised. We follow the cat man into a surreal fantasy universe rendered in negative exposure that reverses color values (black becomes white and vice versa) and the appearance of written words. The cat man steals a car and later picks up a young girl to whom he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven, it turns out, is a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask-wearing weirdoes.