Flush

Cartagena, Roland. “Flush.” Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis. University of the Philippines Film Institute, 2020.

Flush is an animated short film that critically explores the subject matter of material excessiveness and its correlation to unjust labor and capitalist greed. The film follows a day in the job of a worker who serves a swollen man bound in a perpetual cycle of simultaneous consumption and defecation. A series of unprecedented events follow after the man forcibly lays the worker off.

The production thesis uses an arts-based research method in approaching its subject namely a pre-production phase, an in-production phase, and a post-production phase. Grounded on Marxian perspective and interrelated theories of Abjection, the film employs the imagery of excrement as a device to debase abusive capitalist enterprises and denounce the exploitation they engender.

The technique of digital hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation is applied in creating the film, opted to suspend disbelief and add humor, exaggeration, and a satiric undertone to what is otherwise a serious and socially provocative subject.

Keywords: scatology, abjection, animation, capitalism, materialism, class conflict, film

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