Tag: lighthouse

Tallinn 2022 Kids Animation Programme – part 3

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Self-contained fable Birth Of The Oases (Marion Jamault, France, 9 mins) is a near-perfect portrayal of a symbiotic relationship. The cold-blooded hilltop snake struggles to keep warm while the two-humped camel is constantly exhausted by the desert’s heat. They come to a mutually helpful agreement whereby the cold snake takes up residence on the camel’s humps. This warms up the snake and cools down the camel. After the camel dies from old age, the snake moves around the sand dunes – here designed to look like a never ending series of camels humps – to create first water and later full blown oases which, according to the armadillo revealed as the narrator at the very end, to this very day.

In the black and white classroom of the black and white world of The Boy And The Elephant (Sonia Gerbeaud, France, 7 mins), black and white kids taunt someone who is different – a boy with an elephant head who is coloured blue. One kid, though, takes an interest – a boy who is coloured red, and the two embark on a playground friendship which could be read as a gay relationship, a state threatened by the red boy’s need to conform and revert to fit in with the black and whites. Eventually, a black and white girl takes pity on the elephant head, accepts him and he is subsumed into the group.

Marea (Guilia Martinelli, Switzerland, 5 mins) is another self-contained fable about a family living on an island within an hermetically sealed dome.

Stop-frame marvel Laika & Nemo (Jan Gaderman/Sebastian Gadow, Germany, 15 mins), arguably my favourite film in the programme, again concerns an outsider – a boy who lives in a lighthouse who is regularly tormented by fellow pupils and local fishermen at the harbour for wearing deep sea diving gear. When an astronaut crashes his spaceship near the lighthouse, the two helmet-wearers bond which puts them in a good place for when one of those local fishermen drops a key into the harbour.

Last but not least, The Queen Of The Foxes (Marina Rosset, Switzerland, 9 mins) is a French tale about the saddest member of a group of foxes who is, perhaps for that reason, made their queen. The other foxes’ inability to write hampers their attempts at writing such a letter to cheer her up. Instead, they steal from the nearby town all the love letters people have never been brave enough to send, delivering one which results in the uniting of a happy human couple who write their own letter to the fox queen thanking her for their efforts, which finally does the trick. The foxes then deliver the other letters, and the town windows suddenly become full of lively couples, straight, gay, even a threesome.

Which goes to show that programmes of kids animation can be a lot dirtier than you might expect.

The third of three programmes of Kids Animation shorts plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The Lighthouse

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The 1890s. The constant pounding of 19th century industrial machinery. Stark black and white photography in a 4:3 Academy aspect ratio. On the prow of a steamship as it ploughs through the water stand two men. They head towards an island with a light… a lighthouse. They disembark from a rowing boat.

Inside the building, the older lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) instructs his new assistant (Robert Pattinson), who he constantly addresses as “Lad”, in his duties. Despite what’s written in the manual, he won’t allow the assistant to operate the light itself – he’s charged with repair and maintenance work.

They get off to a bad start when the Lad refuses a drink from his new superior, opting for water rather than whisky. Some time later though, he relents to join him in a whisky and asks that they address each other by name. The assistant is Ephraim, the keeper is Tom. Ephraim becomes increasingly unreliable. He has a run in with a gull and lobs a rock at it, an act which upsets Tom who believes that dead sailors’ souls inhabit the birds. Ephraim is sitting in Tom’s hoist halfway up the lighthouse exterior on painting duty when it breaks, causing him to fall some twenty or so feet.

He also has unnerving, increasingly sexual dreams and masturbatory fantasies of a mermaid, brought on perhaps by a combination of the isolation of the place and the small carved mermaid figurine he finds in a slit in his mattress. He finds her lying in recesses under seaweed atop rocks. He imagines tentacles passing and strange, close up shots of orifices in undersea creatures.

The two men’s rough period costumes and lengthy conversations in equally period dialogue over meal times and drink, the cramped lighthouse room and stairwell interiors, the harsh exteriors of rocky outcrop, gulls, mermaids, the contrasty black and white photography, the constant, pounding and pulsing industrial sound, all these elements combine to render the film a unique sensory narrative, visual and aural experience for the viewer.

It helps too that the dramatic element is grounded in two striking lead performances, but the other elements are very much in play. As the film proceeds, it becomes increasingly dreamlike and harder and harder to distinguish fantasy from reality. It’s not always clear if events are unfolding in the real world or somewhere in Ephraim’s subconscious. Like the intermittent shots rising up the spiral staircase lighthouse interior, this us not do much as descent into madness as, disturbingly, an ascent to that state as if it were a higher physical plane.

Although not that long a film, it’s highly demanding, not something to see if you’re quite tired after a hard day’s work. This is not a film that carries the viewer: a certain amount of work is required of the audience. Approach it in that frame of mind, though, and it should prove rewarding.

The Lighthouse is out in the UK on Friday, January 31st. On VoD on Monday, May 25th.