La Cravate aka The Severed Heads

Searching for a way to please an ever-unsatisfied woman, a young man finds a highly unique store where he can change his head and replace it with a new one exhibited in the store. By getting a new head, the personality changes too, however, his several trials with various heads and personalities still does not please the woman. Meanwhile, the sweet owner of the shop gets very fond the young man's original head and she decides to keep it for herself. Giving up his trials to please the woman, the young man goes to the shop to get his own head back, only to find that the shop's owner has changed, now selling hats. He wanders around in a colourful and surreal Paris and he finally finds his head in the shop's original owner's apartment; he gets back his head and by his regained original personality which has grown fond of the sweet girl as a head over the past days, the two gets together.


Chilean scholar Alejandro Jodorowsky's directorial debut, the 1957 short film La Cravate, had been lost for fifty years until it has been found in a German attic in 2006. It is an adaptation of Thomas Mann's 1940 play The Transposed Heads. It is a silent movie in an avant-garde notion, shot as a mime play.

La Cravate is one of the most impressive examples of surrealist avant-garde movements in cinema. What makes it even stronger is the bold use of colours; this both strengthens the effect and gives the movie a rather sweet tone. Unlike Jodorowsky's later works, this is a light-hearted and yet a bizarre movie, with less symbolism, more like a Jean Cocteau style. Jodorowsky made this movie while he was in Paris and was involved in surrealist movement with the troupe of famous pantomime artist Marcel Marceau, whose effects can clearly be seen. Jodorowsky himself plays the young man, with his future wife Denise Brossot as the shop keeper. The music by Edgar Bischoff adds the movie a carnival atmosphere, making it a childlike and yet not childish adventure, as Leslie C. Halpern states.


La Cravate may not be the most important work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, however it certainly is an impressive and promising film debut, and a must-see for the fans of avant-garde cinema.