Irish Film Institute -International Film Directory – Film Listing

Waterbag

    • Director

      Joe Comerford

    • Credits

      Producer: Joe Comerford. Writer: Joe Comerford

    • Principal Cast

      Therese Lawlor, Brian Bourke, Paddy O'Neill

  • Category

    Short
    Experimental

Waterbag was made as a preparation for the 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 frame-by-frame on transparent 16mm film, all with the purpose of asking: “Was it the choice of the foetus not to be born?”

Noes by Eugene Finn

13 minutes, Ireland, 1984, Colour

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