12/07/2023 - A “meme-able” film with vaporwave aesthetics born out of the new digital era

Fest Anča’s international competition leaned towards 2D works this year, but the handful of 3D-style offerings nonetheless stood out and impressed the audience. A prime example is Germany-based British filmmaker Nicolas Gebbe’s The Sunset Special which premiered in Locarno in August 2021. Following the journey of a man with a boat and how he finds the “perfect” partner and the perfect hotel, this 17-minute film explores social media's warped façades and notorious capacity to overwhelm, via a rather surrealistic lens.

All the characters are voiced using computer-generated text-to-speech software, resulting in a manufactured style of narration. The comic value inherent in the characters’ highly ironic lines is heightened through this monotone and emotionless vocalization technique. Character and environment models are greatly minimised and simplified in their details, to the extent that certain clothing items and smaller objects are left incomplete.

The work features highly distinctive background music, greatly reminiscent of the electronic music subgenre and visual art style known as “vaporwave”, which first became famous online in the early 2010s and which uses heavy sampling and popular-culture themes, especially those related to consumerism and advertisements. Distortions, glitches, and other technology-related features are also quite common within this genre.

Many lines of dialogue can easily be traced back to online memes. The woman who eerily asks whether the man has seen her daughter echoes the protagonist of the video game Silent Hill, who also keeps asking people whether they have seen his missing daughter. The man repeatedly saying “I like boats” likewise echoes the “I Like Trains” micro-song by Todd Bryanton, whose animated sketches or asdfmovies were viral hits on YouTube in the 2010s.

Gebbe has stated that The Sunset Special is part of a wider multimedia project. One extension is the website thesunsetspecial.de, whose visitors can look through the film’s “locations” by playing a short, choice-based game. Consumerism-based surreal comedy seems to be the new favourite for both industry and audiences, as demonstrated by the ecstatic ovation and laughter registered at the film’s Fest Anča screening, and the news that Gebbe has secured investment from Germany’s funding-body HessenFilm for The Sunset Special 2.