#in search of the miraculous

Disappearance at Sea II - Tacita Dean

Disappearance at Sea II is the title of a short film made after Disappearance at Sea (1996).  Both works take as their point of departure the story of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur yachtsman from England who joined the solo, round-the-world Sunday Times Golden Globe Race in 1968. The inexperienced (and, some might say, deceptive) Crowhurst quickly ran into difficulties, and eventually his craft, Teignmouth Electron, was found several hundred miles from the coast of Britain, abandoned.  Filmed in anamorphic format at St. Abb’s Head on the east coast of Scotland, Disappearance at Sea uses the light and lenses of a lighthouse and its surrounding landscape to suggestive narrative ends. 

The title Disappearance at Sea II—and especially the subtitle, Voyage de Guérison, which Dean added in her accompanying text—refer to the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde’s misguided, love-potion-induced affair. Tristan, unlike Crowhurst, embraced the ocean’s power: after being mortally wounded, he allowed himself to drift in a voyage de guérison, or journey of healing, to a magical island where he hoped to be cured once again by the powers of Isolde and her mother, the queen.