René Laloux was a very influential French animator in his time and still is. A long time ago on this blog I posted his Fantastic Planet which was his first film that I had the chance to see and incidentally it's his most famous one (perhaps even his best).
Dead Times on the other hand was his first attempt at cinema (according to imdb) way back in 1964. It's a short 9 minute film about humans and their fascination with death and everything related to it. Sort of an satire to our way of living and how much we associate everything with death. The scenes are surreal but are very clear with what they represent in reality. The whole movie is told from someone that is not from our planet. In a way an anthropological study of us and our lives (or our killing of everything more accurately).
While this constitutes as an animated film there are also a lot of live footage and still images (something like in La Jetée). There are few glimpses of how will Rene evolve his way of animation but here this is still very crude and primitive. It does not take away from the atmosphere in any way despite that. Certainly an interesting voyage if you like other Rene's works or surreal films.
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Oh! I was lucky enough to catch a student screening of this at the MFA many years ago...along with La Jetee, how funny you should reference both of them in this post!
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