This article was written as part of the Lab of Creative, Cultural and Festival Journalism held within the Les Arcs Film Festival and organised by the MIOB festival network. This network includes Crossing Europe Filmfestival Linz (AT), Festival de Sevilla (ES), European Film Festival Palić (RS), Les Arcs European Film Festival (FR), Scanorama European Film Forum (LT), Trieste Film Festival (IT) and the FilmFestival Cottbus (DE). With the support of the Creative Europe - MEDIA programme, this project provides cinema journalism training for students and recent graduates. The next edition of the Lab will take place at the Crossing Europe Film Festival.

The participants and mentors of the MIOB Lab of Creative, Cultural and Festival Journalism in Trieste (© Luciana Faino)

Macha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Mascha Schilinski
fiche film] is all about the haunting ghosts of the past. This becomes clear from the very first scenes, in which we see a post-mortem family portrait. This ghostly presence is a motif that repeats throughout the movie in various forms. It emphasizes that although our female protagonists are alive, they are not fully present.

The tradition of post-mortem portraits has its roots in Great Britain’s Victorian era, which was deeply connected with Germany due to trade. Back in the 19th century, after photography was invented, Victorians started the custom of taking photos of the dead so they would not be forgotten. At first, this tradition was reserved for paintings, but the invention of photography made the process easier, faster and more widespread. However, funerary photography lost its popularity during the 20th century. These photos began to evoke feelings of discomfort, disgust, and morbid thoughts in modern people. Death began to be associated with hospitals rather than family homes, as in the past. It became distant and unfamiliar.

The first story out of four presented in the movie takes place in the 1910s, during the transition period when death was no longer ordinary or domestic, but not yet fully hidden. This produced a confusing fixation on it, often accompanied by fascination, connecting four generations of women who lived on the same farm in northern Germany. From the early 20th century until the present day, four female protagonists – Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka – experience all sorts of “little” deaths and self-negations. The generational trauma reappears in different forms, followed by dreamlike death scenarios loosely connected to one another.

Driven by self-doubt from her childhood, a lack of parental love, jealousy, and a sense of inferiority, Lenka’s sister fantasizes about drowning in the same river that took Erika’s life many years before. This illustrates how trauma can be passed down through generations, leading to unfortunate consequences. The same coming-of-age doubts and feelings of low esteem that Lenka’s younger sister awakens had already existed in Lenka. One day, Lenka has a vision of her friend drowning in the same river simply because she chose a more appealing ice-cream flavor.

The motif of drowning is deeply rooted in the movie – as well as mythology and (art) history. We all know Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and her tragic death in the water. She has slowly become an allegory of women’s madness, often caused by patriarchal victimhood. From John Everett Millais’s famous 19th-century painting to Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s music video in the 90s, to Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Lars von Trier
fiche film] today, she represented the sorrow of women that led to tragic death. However, in this depiction of death, we don’t find lament, but beauty. They are peaceful, not disturbing.

Our women surround themselves by fields and rivers. The key to this strange peace is submitting to the long-wished desire to vanish and finally fulfilling it. When we’re talking about women dying in the river, it’s quite impossible not to mention Virginia Woolf’s death – filling her pockets with rocks and walking into the water to let it take her. This kind of imagery sounds like one of those daydream scenarios our protagonists have about dying. It’s as if our floating bodies lead us and turn us into ghostly figures. Our bodies are not ours, and we’re not part of this world.

Interestingly, this is not the only connection between Virginia Woolf and this movie. Her most famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway, was a huge inspiration for The Hours, which follows three women in three different time periods whose lives are affected by Woolf’s novel – and by one another. As in Sound of Falling, we witness trauma echoing across time in The Hours. We see women impacting each other through the stitching of their shared experiences. They are mainly in touch with patriarchal dominance and abuse. They hide their depression very well, because they are taught to.

Speaking of the “cycle of women suicides” present in this movie, it’s important to mention it’s also present in real world that inspired the director: Francesca Woodman’s photographic work. Woodman, an American photographer, is best known for her black-and-white pictures that explored the position of the female body in space. Schilinski realized that the skin remembers even when the brain forgets, and tried to convey that feeling on screen. Woodman’s work had a significant impact because of its eerie atmosphere, which explores the correlation between body and soul. Symbols of death and disappearance are something always visible in her art. Perhaps that’s why she’s often called the “Sylvia Plath of photography.” These two artists are frequently linked because they both explored female identity, gendered suffering, psychological states, and the desire to dissolve or disappear. Unfortunately, the common thread between Plath and Woodman isn’t only in their work, but in their personal lives as well. They both committed suicide, which occupied their art for so long.

Every woman has experienced gazing at herself from the outside. Perhaps because we were forced to get used to men gazing at us. Slowly, we became aware of that look and started looking at ourselves from that perspective. Now, we’re able to perceive our existence and our memories through our bodies. Schilinski’s female protagonists look at themselves from the angle of another time. Angelika, for example, can vividly see herself crashing in the fields, which underscores the melancholy she feels about vanishing. Other characters feel it, too. They can imagine different parallel universes in which they’re dying. Schilinski explores big themes such as self-erasure and fading away. This explains why Alma is recreating a 19th-century portrait of a little girl, trying to disappear through it. In many of her photographs, Woodman portrays a ghostly figure in motion that is often blurry and foggy. Just like in her art, in the movie, after taking a family portrait, Angelika vanishes. The only evidence that she ever existed is her blurry, hovering figure in the family photo. In these cases, our characters see their death fantasies so realistically because their souls left their bodies and died while their bodies stayed behind to witness it.

Just as they’re capable of seeing themselves from another time, they’re also capable of seeing themselves from another perspective. Unfortunately, mostly men’s. Unwanted emotions caused by physical discomfort can trigger memories from the distant past. The body is something we can hardly control. We can’t decide when we will blush or when our heart will stop. It makes decisions on its own. Little Lenka remembers her father’s old friend looking at her topless. This image is so vivid for two reasons. First, it stayed in her body, which felt shame. The second reason is that she looked at herself through his eyes, from the outside. In most cases, we remember others, but not ourselves.

There is also a third gaze. It’s when characters stare at us, breaking the so-called “fourth wall” and confirming the simultaneity of time. They invite us inside – into their world, and their time. Perhaps they are warning us. Or, they may be looking into the past and acknowledging that someone existed in the exact same place before. The protagonists look at us looking at them, while they look into the past. This creates a meta effect. In just one shot, three different realities are presented through the actresses’ gazes. It’s just like the whole movie: lives inside other lives.

At the beginning, we see little Alma standing in line, waiting to enter the room. Suddenly, she looks at us, creating an unsettling feeling. When I saw this scene, I instantly thought about Velázquez’s Las Meninas. In his book The Order of Things, French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about this painting as a “representation of representation”. The artist creates one reality that we cannot see, but we know it’s there through the gazes of the figures in the painting. Schilinski did the same thing. She inverted the roles: the observed look at the world from which they are observed. We, as the audience, become characters in the movie. It’s the same way those women became aware of their bodies when men were gazing at them, and became aware someone had already existed there before them. Perhaps with the same desire to disappear.