Farewell to Tarwathie (2007)

• 76%
• 2007
• Jerzy Rose

"And you haven't even touched your whale meat!" exclaims the Burgomeister in Jerzy Rose's comedic short, FAREWELL TO TARWATHIE. Borrowing the title of a 19th Century folk song about Scottish whalers, Rose plays with the idea of masculinity and male archetypes by giving us a whaler who is secretly in love with the white whale he is supposed to be hunting. Folksinger and collector A.L. Loyd, whose recording of the ballad plays at the end of the film, remarked that "the whaling profession is rigorous and cruel, attracting hard and bloody men... but many of the Scottish whaling songs have a gentle, meditative ring..." Perhaps inspired by this contradiction, Rose plunges to extreme depths of absurdism to emasculate his protagonist.