On screen, as a starting point, a growling, smoking volcano, and images literally turned upside down. The subtitle, “Es ist immer Krieg”, “it is always war”: words borrowed from Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina. For as rare a film-maker as Annik Leroy, this is how the tone of her new film is set. Which war we are talking about here? From yesterday up to the present day, Tremor offers a backwards voyage in European History and the violence it has inflicted upon beings, upon the under-qualified, and the subaltern. Other landscapes will be explored which, as one might guess, do carry a history, testifying to sometimes visible forms of presence like those walls with hallucinated incisions by Fernando Nannetti, or as in that shore one might sense it is the Mediterranean. Places haunted by voices: Pasolini’s, Bachmann’s, Moravia’s, Freud’s or other anonymous ones, such as this mother’s, that child’s; voices expressing insistance, a refusal to give up, and anger. Let us hear once more Bachmann as she pursues by saying: "There’s always violence here. There’s always fighting going on here". A meditation and an epic poem, filmed in sumptuous black and white, Tremor understandably feeds off these figures to scream out anger, to offer an act of resistance, without any nostalgia nor any deploration, while all the energy of Scelsi’s Suite n°11 unfolds in long sequences. A film as message, as a way through the present time. As a weapon too, as the title’s tremor suggests – seismic vibrations accompanying the eruption of a volcano – and those final words: "Men do not cry, they fight."