Irish Film Institute -International Film Directory – Film Listing

Emtigon

    • Director

      Joe Comerford

    • Credits

      Electronic Music: Roger Doyle
      Script and Direction: Joe Comerford

    • Principal Cast

      Danny O'Connor, Carolyn Tipping

  • Category

    Short
    Experimental

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

10mins, Ireland, 1971

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