Greatest Film Scenes
and Moments



Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982)

 



Written by Tim Dirks

Title Screen
Movie Title/Year and Scene Descriptions
Screenshots

Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982, UK)

In Alan Parker's cultish, downbeat re-imagining of the Pink Floyd album, a musical "free form video" masterpiece - a remarkable descent into madness and insanity through a series of rambling music video segments by burned-out and depressed rock singer Pink (Bob Geldorf) in a Los Angeles hotel room, mostly mindlessly watching TV - he constructed a physical and metaphorical protective wall around himself after the death of his father as he experienced flashbacks of his life and attempted to tear down the wall:

Pink in LA hotel room
  • in the animated and nightmarish "Goodbye Blue Sky," a dove imploded and morphed into a dark monstrous bird of prey -- a fighter plane bomber over London
"Goodbye Blue Sky"
"In the Flesh"
Crossed Marching Hammers
in "Waiting For the Worms"
  • in "In the Flesh", Pink envisioned himself as an eyebrowless, racist, fascist Hitler-like leader of a Nuremberg-like rally (with a skinhead chorus) of faceless followers, symbolized by crossed arms and fists, while in the musical "Waiting for the Worms" animated segment, cartoon hammers rhythmically marched (or goose-stepped) down bombed out streets and ruins
  • in the ugly segment "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2," marching schoolchildren were turned into faceless, conforming zombies on an assembly line within an oppressive school system, seated at desks or plodding along, before being fed into an approaching meat-grinder, ultimately they rioted, threw off their masks, and rebelled against their authoritarian education
"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2"
  • there were 15 minutes of memorable, adult-themed animation that appeared periodically during the film by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe (including symbolic, sexually-explicit, botanical Freudian animation). It was one of the first truly adult animated work in terms of maturity - sexually and politically. One segment presented a misogynistic woman-as-destroyer/devourer motif. In the passionate "flowers" scene before the rock song "Empty Spaces," two flowers, one shaped like a male organ and the other like a female organ -- morphed into a couple having intercourse and then engaged in a bloody fight when the female flower revealed sharp teeth and devoured the male
  • in the concluding trial sequence (with Pink on trial, and portrayed as a rag doll within his cinderblock wall), a giant creature named Judge Arse, who appeared to be a giant set of buttocks (topped with a wig) that talked out of his anus in a kangaroo courtroom scene; finally ordered and yelled out: "Tear down the wall" - and the brick wall exploded into many fragments to liberate Pink

The Wall

The Pain



Gerald Scarfe's Botanical Act of Intercourse and Devourment




"The Trial" - with Judge Arse

The Exploding Wall

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