It’s rare to find as tender a film as Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Ildikó Enyedi
scheda film] in the Venice competition line-up, yet the Hungarian director has managed to surprise audiences with a story told in three timelines – 1908, 1972 and 2020 – where the one, constant witness is an enormous ginkgo tree in the Marburg University botanical gardens. On the day of the film’s world premiere on the Lido, Cineuropa spoke to Enyedi about how her newest effort approaches the relationship between human and non-human beings.

Cineuropa: In your films, the relationship between the human and non-human worlds is not only metaphorical, but also literal. For example, Silent Friend does not anthropomorphise any of its plants. Does cinema need metaphors?
Ildikó Enyedi: There is this amazing book by Artur Kösler called The Sleepwalkers. It’s a history of European cosmological thinking, from ancient Egypt to Einstein, exploring hardcore science, from the perspective of new metaphors. So, even if the metaphors we describe the world with are not as picturesque as, for example, elephants holding up the globe, they provide the language through which we can offer a model [of thinking]. That metaphorical model would then define how we move in the world and feel in our everyday life, at least for a certain period, before it changes. In many ways, we are still in the 19th century.

How did you convey such a balanced relationship between humans, flora and fauna in this film?
It’s the result of a series of decisions made during writing and preparation, on what not to do. Everything we omitted from our toolbox, so to speak, gave space to both the humans and the plants [in that botanical garden] to simply exist. It’s quite a tricky thing to do in a feature film, to create a subtle feeling of a difference in pace, but I agreed to abide by the rules. I guess the result has to do with the contrast between different rhythms, their meeting points or where they clash, trying to somehow give at least a glimpse of this other pace [of existence].

There are three timelines that meet in the film, 1908, 1972, and 2020. How would you describe the significance of each?
Each one of them has a distinct meaning that plays into why I chose it, but three is the smallest magic number and the smallest number that creates the feeling of a system. So even if you choose three, it could equally be five, seven or another number of parts, but for our film, it means that we were able to pick many moments [among those narrative lines] where everything would be and feel different. Within each timeline, the pace the humans move at would be different. [For the viewer,] the perception of the three timelines would be the same, but the perception of the humans [within each one] would be different. For example, the characters would focus on different things in the same garden, the same world. So, in some way, choosing three timelines shows that these big moments of encounters and discovery are arbitrary.

But they are not quite arbitrary, as it is a film.
Of course not, because I also wanted to show how quickly our gaze changes – the biggest change in the 20th century was the late 1960s, or the early 1970s, a period that really questioned everything we knew. Personally, I feel very lucky that as a teenager [in the Eastern Bloc], I had special permission to study at a Swiss university. I was among those young people, like in the 1972 timeline of the film, who really believed that they could rethink and change the way we lived and how we approached nature. If you compare it with the 1908 timeline, the biggest difference is that, before World War I, people felt that everything would last.

Visually, the three parts of the movie are made distinct – 35 mm black and white, 16 mm and digital, both in colour – but how did you make sure there was continuity and also enough difference between the timelines, that would also allow for the changes to show?
Grete, the first female student at her university, is one of the signs that not everything will last. Her time was about structure, rules and control, in every sense of the word. You can see it in the botanical garden: at first, there are small fences protecting the grass, and nobody is trespassing. But in the 1970s, it’s like a big explosion of people all over the grass. Another detail I like is the hair – every haircut tells you so much about the state of culture at the time. I think 2020 was a very exceptional time, but somehow, it also summarises the deep anxiousness and neuroses we feel nowadays. But for us, like for Professor Wong, it was a unique chance to halt our daily routine and discover things anew.