La Table
2016 · 4m · France
Directed by Eugène Boitsov
Genres: animation, dark comedy, experimental
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
A perfectionist carpenter, Mr. Carpenter, is obsessed with creating the ideal table — the work of his life — rendered in meticulous cut-paper animation influenced by suprematism and Tangram geometry.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A four-minute meditation on futility wrapped in suprematist geometry—Boitsov commits so fully to the bit that the obsession becomes its own darkly comic argument against perfectionism itself, which is basically a middle finger to every craft-fetishist out there, and I'm here for it.
The paper-cut animation sits squarely in a lineage of modernist form-making, from Lye to Trnka, but Boitsov weaponizes suprematism's rigid grid against human aspiration in a way that feels genuinely earned—a short that knows exactly what formal tradition it inhabits and what it's saying about the futility within it.
The decision to let the carpenter *fail* silently, frame after frame, through purely geometric means—no dialogue, no sentiment, just shapes collapsing—is what transforms a conceptual premise into something that actually *hurts*.
Reviews
Ce film ingénieux, graphique et plein d'humour noir explore les limites de l'obsession par la perfection et nous offre une vision particulière de la tension entre vie et oeuvre. La relation art-artiste, le processus créatif et la réception de l'oeuvre sont autant de sujets remarquables au service ce de film d'école intemporel et impeccable.