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February 6, 2011

Scared Sheetless

Sergio Caballero's feature Finisterrae won a Tiger Award at Rotterdam this past week. I know nothing about the picture, other than what I culled from David Hudson's post about it and the trailer that was included therein:

Outside of the film's own latent qualities, the image of those two phantasms cut straight to my child's heart and made me innately happy. This, I can only imagine, was the director's intent: to depict literal spirits, but represent them in a symbolic mode with endless external connotations (childhood, Halloween, etc) and meta-perceptions.

I made a cursory investigation into the history of bedsheet ghosts (they began to appear on stage in the 1800s when the traditional representation of spectral presences via an actor in knight's armor became too technically cumbersome) and appearances in other media. Beetlejuice and Halloween both poke fun at the motif. Patrick Daughters provided a glimpse of a sheet-clad wraith in his Bats For Lashes video before going all the way in this Marcel Dzama-designed clip for Department Of Eagles:

I remembered seeing some in this She & Him video, but they don't quite fit the bill. Too culturally distinct and/or animated:

Where I'm going with all of this, basically, is that I wish I'd thought of everything I'm reading into the Finisterrae traile before I'd actually seen it, and made it into a movie of my own.

Posted by David Lowery at February 6, 2011 6:35 PM