Director: Martin Gerigk
Running time: 6mins
I would like to be talking about Martin Gerigk’s photography skills here – or his talents as a composer. Another of his films, Demi-Demons, recently came highly recommended to me. I have heard that he has a unique eye for photo-collage, and has a deft ability to combine those montages with evocative sound design and moving scores. But very little of that was on display in the film of his that I have actually seen.
According to its submission notes, the film’s origins were in a dream, more than 30 years ago. Gerigk is a music composer, and states that he will “occasionally dream of complete compositions” – and on one such occasion, dreamt he was dissolving into the sea – but his mood was calm, one of serene acceptance of an inevitable “gentle passing”. After Gerigk performed the piece which soundtracked this dream, a member of the audience presented a small drawing to him, which was inspired by the music. It was art which Gerigk felt had “captured the essence of my dream”.
These could have been the ingredients of an interesting film – but have ultimately been left on the shelf. In revisiting his placid, fatalistic dream decades later, Gerigk has largely abandoned creating a sense of organic calm through actual work, and seems to have substituted it with artificially generated tedium.
Using AI to create imagery around one or two moody black and white photographs of a churning ocean, Prayer of the Sea is an unrelentingly boring, ugly watch. Stitched together from a billion spasming fragments of AI animation, it depicts a lone man – sterile, photoshop-perfectly rendered as long as nothing moves around him – looking out across a tumultuous black and white ocean; perfectly rendered until it has to interact with the stationary figure.
This is what happens when a stoppable force meets a moveable object. A mess of fluctuating limbs and contradictory waves – the required data centres burning down several rainforests and draining a reservoir as the artificial ‘intelligence’ struggles to work out how a human body would interact with the to-and-fro of the sea. To be fair to the technology, it can’t work out that glue doesn’t belong on pizza, so why would I expect it to do better here? Better to deploy it for something more manageable, like mental health advice…
But I digress. I have no interest in making this technology or its dubious output seem in any way remarkable – even if that were to be remarkable in the sense of how bad it is. That would be to attribute undue credit; as we know, bad taste, bad writing, bad films all have a time and a place where even they can be appreciated.
This is the sum of an artistic vision which outstripped its creator’s abilities. A uniquely human struggle – one which reveals that art itself is not in the formulation of ideas, but in the discipline and rigour of realising them. Underestimate that process, and the outcomes will be hilarious – but in a way that however much we might think we are laughing at, we are also laughing with. We have all bitten off more than we can chew in some aspect of our lives, and been taught a lesson in humility as a result.
These were forces with which the director was once familiar. But even if you think the imagery is ‘pretty’ – with the supremely defined corners and crevices AI imagery always gives itself away with, even when it gets shapes ‘right’ – Prayer of the Sea has none of this interest. There is no point of empathetic purchase for us to engage with, no human experience for us to relate to. It never feels like for better or worse, we are watching the ideas of a human being living and dying on the screen.
The film’s overarching motif itself suffers for this. A “gentle passing”, surrendering to oblivion after a life of raging against the dying of the light, is meaningless without that absent spark of a filmmaker’s ingenuity. It never feels like, for better or worse, we are watching the ideas of a human being living and dying on the screen. Instead, it feels like we have attended the wake of his ambition.
Whether or not the bulk of the imagery in Prayer of the Sea is ‘real’, the fact would remain that we have seen everything contained in the film done better elsewhere. But the warping of the lone man’s face when he moves, the fusing of his fingers as he attempts to drape them through the surf, and the weird fuzz of waves crashing in on themselves are all depressing reminders of a director who was not even invested in his own vision.