La tumba del marinero
2014 · 5m · España
Directed by Carlos Santa, Cecilia Traslaviña, Cheng Kemei, Isabel Herguera, José Belmonte, Juan Camilo Gonzalez, Koldo Almandoz, Richard Reeves, Vuk Jevremovic, Wang Liming
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
The horrors of a shipwreck, the bells of a forgotten lighthouse, and the becoming of the tides surround a tale around the sea, the result of a workshop whose working method is inspired by the game of the 'exquisite corpse', a mechanism of collective creation where the participants manipulate and transform each other's drawings, building in this way an intuitive and unforeseen narration.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Ten directors playing exquisite corpse with a shipwreck narrative should be a gimmick disaster, but instead it's genuinely eerie—the film's refusal to cohere into conventional storytelling IS the point, and it works because nobody's trying to impose sense on the chaos.
This is what happens when formal constraint becomes artistic method: the exquisite corpse framework isn't novelty but a rigorous tradition of collective creation, and the film's fragmented beauty—melancholic, surreal, formally coherent despite its anarchic origins—proves the discipline embedded in the process.
The masterstroke here is sonic: those lighthouse bells cutting through abstract animation fragments create continuity where the visual narrative deliberately dissolves, turning what could be incomprehensible into something hypnotic and mournful with a single sound design choice.