Summary

Barge Dirge is an experimental short that ponders death and industrial decay, a tense and mournful tone piece that imagines the rubble of humanity long forgotten. While Joyce Weiland’s iconic Sailboat bobbed freely on pale blue waters, McIntyre’s rusty barge rots trapped in frozen arctic permanence; heavy, unmoving, abandoned. As frozen mechanical flotsam flashes on screen we are left to wonder what, exactly, is being mourned? Perhaps community? A way of life? Our environment? Humanity itself? Barge Dirge challenges notions of legacy and memory by presenting us with only the ugliest remnants of humanity, preserved in a boundless frozen wasteland.