As post-war white America was about to enter a phase of conformity and project an image of the clean-cut nuclear family, Curtis Harrington was making shorts like this one, revealing his angst of trying to fit in to that kind of heteronormative world.
The setting is the base of a cliff by the ocean, where a young man is having a picnic with his family. In a dreamlike state, he sees a woman dancing along the shore in the distance, and pursues her. Along the way, he sees a well-dressed man carrying an umbrella and walking in the opposite direction, and is distracted to the point of having the waves wash up over his shoes. As he returns his attention to the young woman, he climbs the cliff, wanders through a barren landscape and then through brambles, and finds her at last. The pair have those whirling moments of connection when you feel when you first fall in love with someone, and yet things soon freeze emotionally, and he remains distracted, the imagery of which is an open umbrella in the swirling mist.
It's a bit like 'Fragment of Seeking' and I suppose it's pretty obvious what Harrington is trying to say, but I'm not sure it was so obvious in 1949, and while Hollywood studios were toeing the line to the reactionary Production Code, to have a film like this made by a 23-year-old is deeply meaningful. I found the imagery in the film at the top of that staircase to be particularly powerful, with the feeling of a spiritual crisis and annihilation of self really coming through. The 22 minute runtime could probably have been tightened up a teeny bit, but be patient with this one, it's worth it.