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The film is highly metaphorical and is rich in symbolic imagery and sound. It features very little dialogue and is mainly driven by the Pink Floyd sound ...
Directed by Alan Parker ; Produced by Alan Marshall
Written by Roger Waters ; Narrated by Pink Floyd
Starring ...
Bob Geldof
Christine Hargreaves
Eleanor David
Alex McAvoy
Bob Hoskins
Michael Ensign
Music by Pink Floyd & Michael Kamen (orchestrations)
The film depicts the construction and ultimate demolition of a metaphorical wall. Though the film is open to interpretation, the wall itself clearly reflects a sense of isolation and alienation.
Pink played by Bob Geldof, the protagonist of the film, is a rock star, one of several reasons behind his apparent depressive emotional state. He is first seen in a quiet hotel room, having trashed it. The opening music is not by Pink Floyd, but is the Vera Lynn recording of "The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot". During the following scenes, it is revealed that Pink's father was killed during World War II while he was just a baby.
The movie then flashes back to Pink as a young English boy growing up in the early 1950s. Throughout his childhood, Pink longs for a father figure. At school, he is humiliated for writing poems in class. The poems that the teacher reads aloud are lyrics from "Money" from the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon. Pink is also affected by his overprotective mother. He eventually gets married, but he and his wife grow apart and she has an affair while Pink is on tour. When Pink learns of the affair, he resorts to acquiring expensive materialistic possessions and turns to a willing groupie (Jenny Wright), only to trash the hotel room and drive her away.
Pink slowly begins to lose his mind to metaphorical worms. He shaves off all of his body hair (an incident inspired by former band member Syd Barrett, who appeared at a 1975 recording session of Wish You Were Here, having shaved his eyebrows and body hair and, while watching The Dam Busters on television, morphs into his neo-Nazi alter-ego. Pink's manager (Bob Hoskins), along with the hotel manager (Michael Ensign) and some paramedics, discover Pink, and inject him with drugs to enable him to perform. On stage, Pink hallucinates that he is a neo-Nazi dictator, his concert a rally in a suburban neighbourhood singing "Waiting for the Worms". The scene is inter-cut by images of the animated marching hammers ...
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The three-day initiation ceremony is used for spiritual or personal development, and to become a man. First the initiate eats the sliced root of the Iboga tree over a period of hours, monitored by his Bwiti father, and the visions begin. The Iboga allows him to see into his true self and vividly revisit the consequences of his past actions. After 24 hours of this, the initiate is taken to the river by the men. They lift him through a construction of twigs shaped like a vulva suspended over the water, then wash him with water soaked with leaves. The men pull a sapling of the sacred matombi tree from the forest, and plant it outside the Bwiti temple - it represents the initiate as a child. Throughout the day the elders feed him small pieces of Iboga, and the whole village perform, dancing in vivid costumes, in a way designed to bring on further hallucinations.
In the last phase, the initiate is called upon to see the Bwiti visions. Fire dancers sprint the length of the village to entice the Macoi spirits from the darkness of the forest. The initiate must tell the elders what he has seen; this is sacred knowledge, known only to them, and through it he becomes a man. The villagers meanwhile plant a forest around the matombi tree, to represent the problems to be faced in adult life. Together, the men break up the trees branch by branch to symbolise the removal of all his problems.
