Breathdeath by Stan Vanderbeek (1963)

Dur­ing the mid-1950s, Stan Van­der­beek began shoot­ing sur­re­al­ist col­lage films that, as NPR put it, “used clip­pings from mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers to cre­ate whim­si­cal but point­ed com­men­tary.” If you think this sounds famil­iar, you’re right. It’s pre­cise­ly this approach that sur­faces lat­er in Ter­ry Gilliam’s own work. And if one film pro­vid­ed par­tic­u­lar inspi­ra­tion, it was Vanderbeek’s 1963 film Breathdeath.

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