Ubu Arena (1979)
By Alfred Jarry
The television premiere of Geoff Dunbar’s brilliant animation film. Based on Alfred Jarry’s notorious surrealist hero, Pere Ubu, it chronicles the rise to power of a kind of punk Macbeth: a lewd and unscrupulous despot with the mentality of a petit bourgeois, and with absolutely no redeeming qualities. Ubu Roi was originally written by Jarry as a schoolboy in 1888, and eventually presented to an outraged public in 1896. For his version of the story, Dunbar has invented a brutal and graphic style to recreate the explosive impact of Jarry’s original production.
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