Wind
Entry updated 28 February 2022. Tagged: Film.
Armenia animated film (1988; vt Veter). Armenfilm. Directed by Robert Sahakyants. Written by G Danielyan. 18 minutes. Colour.
As nuclear missiles launch (see World War Three), a junior officer at a military base inspects the passes of the arriving senior staff. Initially fairly normal, the staff become more unusual as time goes on – tailed, three-legged, four-legged, an additional head on their groin, a woman's breasts on their back, plus three uniformed apes (see Monsters). Meanwhile, little masked men affix more launch buttons to the operating consoles whilst a technician injects himself with Drugs, then inflates a Sex doll who comes to life – he allows her to launch more rockets. One of the buttons launching the missiles becomes stuck, launching rocket after rocket, until a mechanic casually repairs it; he and the operator then test it repeatedly.
The only one worried by events is the junior officer, who tries to leave the building, but the stairs always bring him back to his original room; at one point he glimpses another version of himself. He eventually succeeds in reaching another floor, only to discover more oddness – a butterfly with ears for wings, Napoleon carried by an elephant-headed man – as the building's topography proves increasingly inconsistent. A launch console becomes a Videogame, its screen showing the earth blacking out segment by segment: the officer, looking out of the windows, sees the scenery turning black too. One window still shows a landscape, albeit with snow falling (see Nuclear Winter): breaking the glass he leaps out, but the blackness arrives, dissolving him. Wind gusts through the broken window, turning everyone inside to dust, save for the sex doll; on a television screen Dinosaurs are singing "We Are the World" (the USA for Africa charity song), though they stop to watch the doll deflate.
Reflecting the era's fear of nuclear war, Wind like many other works uses Absurdity to convey the insanity of the situation (see Satire). Though sometimes heavy-handed – such as the appearance of Napoleon and unsubtle use of music, one of Sahakyants's weaknesses as seen in The Lesson (1977) – this is nevertheless an intriguing evocation of Paranoia. [SP]
links
previous versions of this entry