Sirene (1968)

" This begins with a punch; like Saul Bass opening credits the screen is red, cranes defy each other like prehistoric monsters, ship hooks quarrel about the cases, bomb shells secretly escape by rolling over the quays. We are in a port, a sad port where a sailing-vessel stops rusting. Starting point only because here, the world looks as if it has been emptied of its inhabitants. The only notable presence, a little fisherman, brings back nothing but fish-skeletons in his baskets, and the entire city, with its cranes and its mooring cables, appears like a pile of nets and fish bones, carcass of a declining industrial universe. On the bow of the sailing-ship, a whistling cabin-boy - one of those gentle artists who Servais adorns his films. He charms a siren- or rather, her reflection. The sails will disappear when the dinosaur cranes grab her and throw her on to the quay... As the idyll between eerie representations (a bow of a ship and a siren), "Sirène" was perceived as an early denouncement of the degradation of the environment. Today, the film comes to us both as a poem dedicated to freedom and as a sarcastic vision of the order imposed by human society. "

Read "Raoul Servais, An Interview," by Philippe Moins, published in the August 1996 issue of Animation World Magazine.