For this week’s edition we chose to look at short films rather than feature films. This format echoes to our chosen theme, exploring the ephemeral for their short lengths, a subject that resonates with the very notion of time.

Click on the images to access the short films (both have english subtitles available).

I Swallowed a Caterpillar is a French animated short film directed by Basile Khatir displayed on ARTE and free of access on YouTube.

This moving image piece puts the viewers in the sub-conscious of a young man, Tristan, put in the coma after swallowing a caterpillar at a party in order to impress the pretty Eloïse. He finds himself in a sort of desert where the surrounding noises are heard through big speakers. We follow his thought process as he believes he’s only been in the coma for a few days or weeks, when we are also given the bigger picture of the hospital room, where his friend comes and visits him with his newborn child, making it clear he has been there for years now. The caterpillar acts as a metaphor of swallowing it for it to bloom and become a butterfly, linking back again to a temporary state and constant evolution. The means of making are multiples and always very colourful and bright.

With a light and humoristic tone, the short film questions the matter of time, our individual and unique perception of it whilst using a casual vocabulary. It also raises observations such as the time one wastes waiting at red lights (which raises up to 6 months in total of our lives). Being in a coma is also relevant regarding the topic of the temporary for its very nature of being in-between life and death, the conscious and the subconscious.

This short film is an effective example of how to use different locations and sets to convey a character’s emotional struggles and entrapment. Indeed, we can first observe this use of interiors with Tristan’s hospital room. Throughout the story we see it from different angles and with different characters, yet we never explore it through the eyes of the main character. It’s as if a camera was always posted near his head, near his body but it was never him. This goes to show the gap that there is between his body and his mind since the coma. In addition, the room is always blue-toned with blue walls, blue curtains and bed sheets. However, when we first see the mother as she is doing some kind of ritual to try and wake him up, the entire background becomes warm with various tints of orange, red and yellow. This is a way to express to the viewer how the  mother is the only one to bring warmth to Tristan and to the space, even if he finds her rituals funny and a bit crazy. 

To continue, there is a recurrent use of liminal spaces in this short film. Indeed, when we see Tristan in his new “coma world”, he is living in the desert, only surrounded by speakers echoing distant sounds of the real world. Here the desert represents a liminal space, there is no path to take, no direction, no possible evolution in that space. It represents the reality of this state where he can wonder and think without truly making it out, it represents his state of entrapment. Another set is the river where we see the main character drift on while being sat on him mattress. Here the river could be interpreted as a symbol of time passing, of his lack of control over his life, of people gradually moving on. In addition, as he is sat on his bed he watches the jungle around him implying how distant he is from the real world, how he’s only an observer now.

Lastly, there is a hint as to who he was before with a very short cut scene showing the viewer his school classroom and more specifically the empty table he used to sit at. This is how we learn that his name is actually Tristan as he seems to have carved it onto the wood surface of the table. This is an essential scene as it shows the empty gap he left around his peers, the trace that his existence left, just like his named carved on the table. No one started sitting back at his table, or until that point in the story.

This animated short film is the work of three students at the Parisian school Les Gobelins; Chloé Farr, Gabrielle Selnet Adam Sillard.

Jérôme, once arrived in paradise is looking everywhere for his deceased wife that arrived a year before him. He asks if people saw her, first by describing her physically, then by wondering if a woman called Marilyn ordered a specific meal, her favourite cocktail or at a party if someone was dancing this particular dance. Knowing someone that well can only remain temporary as people change, in that case even beyond life, making everything ephemeral.

The work of the animation is very impressive and striking for its creativity, for its vivid colour palette as well as its unexpected transportation of change of settings, a characteristic bien peculiar to animation.

One can notice its inspiration of surrealism taken from Dalí trough the dreamlike decors, the colours as well as the psychedelic elements. This artistic movement takes its roots from the exploration of the subconscious, a litemotiv that we seem to find in works exploring the ephemeral, such as I Swallowed a Caterpillar mentioned above as well as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in a live action version.

Goodbye Jerôme is a wonderful short story punctuated with set designs each time more complex and beautiful than the last as we roam through heaven with the main character.

As soon as he goes in, he only takes one brief moment to look around him before a table appears with a telephone for him to call his missing wife. Since the beginning, we are made aware that the soul purpose of him coming to heaven is to be reunited with her. Then we are transported from the endless field of flower to a forest riddled with extraordinary trees and a mysterious creature resting in one. There, we see Jerôme popping out from different trees, looking around for his beloved. He eventually leaves from one side of the scene to come out from the other, showing the viewer his strong sense of loss as this world doesn’t seem to make sense without her. It could also be said that the style of this short film sort of reminds the viewer of Michel Ocelot’s Ti-Jean et la Belle Sans Connaitre.

Then, we see Jerome walking through a maze to reach a hotdog vendor as his search seems to become increasingly complicated. So much so, he seems to have lost his appetite and refuses one of said hotdog.

We are then sent off to the shore where we see the main character ask a mermaid if she has seen his wife. Here, most of the screen is underwater where we can discover luxurious wildlife and fauna, all of which Jerôme is unaware of as he is so focused on the search for his wife that he is unable to discover the wonderful nature around him. This continues as he then moves on to a ballroom, followed by a bar where he exclusively refuses every invitations strangers give him. 

When he finally finds his wife, she is sat reading under a weeping willow, strong symbole of grief and mourning, but also a reference to places such as graveyards, hinting at the death of their relationships which will soon happen. Behind them we can observe a far off river, symbolising how she has moved on, how life for her has kept going since her death compared to how Jerôme’s has frozen.

Later when he jumps off the balcony, we see him fall down until what can be interpreted by the shift in colour as his personal hell where his body breaks into a million pieces due to his broken heart. He is gradually put back together by ants, themselves representing the resilience and hard work, as well as emotional support from friends an family often needed to move on from breakups.

A musical section then takes over the screen as life, joy and freedom is slowly flowing back into Jerôme, eventually leaving him looking at an anthill demonstrating how, now that he is healed, this entire heartbreak was just a bump in the road that he can now overcome and step over.

The short film ends with him finally bitting into the hotdog, now feeling finally fully alive, hungry for more.