Title: Four Walls of Memory
Foreign Title:
Year: 2024
Country: Poland
Language: English
Awards:
Director: Joanna Płatek
When you think about it, animated shorts are potentially the most imaginative and problematic of all the film genres. Nothing is off the table. Four Walls of Memory may not be the most abstruse work, but it does provide the type of “situation” that will test even the more “open-minded” cinephiles among us.
And the more distant from our experience the imagery, the more effort it will take to appreciate the aim(s) of this film.
Sans dialogue, in shades of black and white, it is an allegory of trauma and its treatment: a girl is fleeing through the woods pursued by a black, monstrous, wolf-like creature. Before she reaches the safety of the simple four-walled shack of her mind, the ribbon tied to her hair tying her to reality is caught on a branch and falls on the ground. She runs through the open door of the shack and hides. Immediately, the creature follows her in and slams against the wall, falls down dead, ending her fear.
Escaping a traumatic memory, finding safety inside the four walls of the mind, the 24-year-old director Joanna Płatek has found her “treatment” in the shelter of the shack but the door is suddenly locked, she has destroyed her fear/pursuer but is suffering from her desire for food. It’s still all a nightmare until she hears a bespectacled kindly authority figure outside the four walls playing some uplifting swing music. She is hallucinating a jazz trio of the flies that have been buzzing her, and the music has grown so uplifting that she ends up dancing around with the corpse of the creature. The door also opens, offering to return her ribbon which she surprisingly refuses. More abstracted beings approach, and more shacks are now visible. The treatment is working outside the four walls; the treatment has worked.
