Waterbag
Joe Comerford
Artist's biography
Synopsis
'Waterbag was made as a preparation for Comerford's feature Reefer and the Model. Set on a fishing trawler,it involves the relationship between two fishermen and a pregnant woman and ends with an apparently self-induced miscarriage. Haunting slow-motion images of a swaying rocking horse accompany composer Roger Doyle’s score (a music box nursery rhyme), bringing Waterbag to an enigmatic, moving finish. As in Emtigon, and later RoadSide, the filmmaker experiments with combinations of live action and abstraction: “I was attempting to alter the form of the film’s language, enabling an altogether different visual flow. The idea was to test the standard procedure of using dialogue to convey narrative by replacing it with abstract imagery. This meant shooting the film twice – firstly, in a conventional way, with actors, and, secondly, retelling the story in abstract form by painting frameby-frame on transparent 16mm film, all with the purpose of asking: “Was it the choice of the foetus not to be born?”' (Sourced from http://www.ifi.ie/wp-content/uploads/Joe-Comerford-Painting-a-Feature-by-Eugene-Finn1.pdf on June 12th 2016)
Images
Details
Title
Waterbag
Year
1984
Form
Short
Key phrases
absolute, abstract live action, lyrical, portrait, trance, pregnancy, docklands (dublin, ireland)
Language
English (eng)
Duration
00:09:00
Original formats
Physical: Film: 16mm
Aspect ratio
to be confirmed
Colour
Mixture
Sound
Yes