A SURREALISTIC VIDEO FOR ‘BRAIN POLICE’ DIRECTED BY ZAPPA COLLABORATOR ED SEEMAN

A SURREALISTIC VIDEO FOR ‘BRAIN POLICE’ DIRECTED BY ZAPPA COLLABORATOR ED SEEMAN

01.23.2013
02:23 pm

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Movies
Music

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Zappa
Ed Seeman
Uncle Meat

Animator and experimental film maker Ed Seeman worked closely with Frank Zappa in the late ‘60s on a film called Uncle Meat. Over 14 hours of footage was shot for the project but it never came to completion. Zappa purchased Seeman’s share of the film and basically shelved it. A documentary about the making of Uncle Meat was released by Zappa on VHS in 1987 and is highly collectible. It has never been released on DVD.

Zappa once described the film thusly:

It deals with the conflicts that face an average middle-class sort of person who works for the government and does a bunch of things for the government that he’s not proud of and can’t tell his family what he’s doing. See. Because he’s doing a top secret project for the government. See. It gets quite complicated.

Seeman has taken parts of Uncle Meat and edited them into a 40 minute impressionistic collage. Here’s an excerpt set to The Mothers Of Invention’s “Who Are The Brain Police.” If you’re interested in seeing more, you can purchase a DVD at Seeman’s website.

Of all of Zappa’s songs this may be my favorite. It melds Zappa’s cynical world view (perhaps prophetic) with a spookily psychedelic sound that creates a perfect paranoid whole.

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