Stand by your fan... a still from the animation by Lori Samsel.
This short animation by Lori Samsel, is titled The Fan - A love Story. It reminds me a little of Loaded magazine's bizarre photo-romance, My Gay Lamp, in which Loaded staffer Michael Holden falls in love with a promiscuous table lamp who spurns romantic candle-lit dinners in favour of wild nights in the lighting departments of expensive department stores.
The Fan tells a similarly weird tale of a woman who falls in love with a cooling fan. On a blisteringly hot day, the woman wanders the streets of an anonymous metropolis, imagining that the sun is taking malicious, sadistic delight in frying and eating her.
As I type I am sitting outside a bar in Mantova, on Italy's Pianura Padana, and the temperature is already 32 degrees, and will probably rise to about 40 before the day is out. Around here, farmers call the sun la bestia - the beast - something Lori Samsel's minimally but beautifully drawn heroine would surely understand. I know I do.
