Joe Comerford’s first film involves a process that informs all of his other work.  The combination of “elements of narrative with abstraction”.

A pitch-black Beckett-like vaudeville of impotence and aggression, Emtigon tragicomically details a homeless old man’s covert intrusion on a young woman social worker.

Claustrophobic framing and cutting refuses the viewer an easy interpretation or even a comfortable point of view but the abstractions hint and nudge at possible meanings. An associational montage of images from World War I suggests a collective memory that might somehow underlie the protagonist’s behavior.

The final image of a stolen house-key dropped into dark canal waters is emblematic of this filmmaker’s opaque, poetic narratives.

Notes by Eugene Finn