Dedicated to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. A surrealistic fantasy based on the 15th century woodcuts of the dance of the dead. A film experiment that deals with the photoreality and the surrealism of life. It is a collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing a harp in the middle of a battlefield?) with the inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks at death... a parabolic parable.

Realized with Johanna Vanderbeek
Soundtrack: Jay Watt

Awards: Bell Telephone Prize; Third Experimental Film Competition, Knokkele-Zout, Belgium, 1964; Midwest Film Festival, 1965; Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1964; Top prize, Independent Film-makers festival at Foothill College, CA, 1965; Sydney Film Fest, 1965; Melbourne Film Fest, 1965; San Francisco International Film Fest 1964; Midwest FF 1964

Preserved in 2019 by New American Cinema Group-Filmmakers' Coop and Stan VanDerBeek Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant Program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by The George Lucas Family Foundation.