Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of having lived otherwise — in another time or place, or in a manner less harshly consummated by regret or resentment. Infected by this realization, Mascha Schilinski’s phenomenal Sound of Falling suffuses its textures of bare, unadulterated vignettes with the porousness that comes with things half-remembered, events reconstituted, all to permeate the vague and vast gestalt of collective memory. This memory, rooted in the damp, rural landscape of north Germany at a farmhouse in Altmark, straddles both the universal and the particular: over a hundred years, four generations of women are born, live, and die amidst two world wars and the partitioning of the country into East and West. Little of these events, however, are observed, much less consecrated in stone.
In fact, virtually nothing in Sound of Falling comes close to the stony finality sought by most genealogies, and not even the prospect of death takes on such a note. For the women on the farm, death is a factual inevitability, not necessarily a feeling to be experienced firsthand. Taking her cue perhaps from Epicurus, Schilinski inverts the Hellenist’s maxim of disregarding the end into a lingering obsession with and anticipation for it. Young Alma, played with chilly and morbid inquisitiveness by Hanna Heckt, is our narrative’s progenitor, living at the turn of the century in pallid, claustrophobic gloom. At a commemoration of All Souls Day, when the family’s deceased are paraded on the mantelpiece in monochrome daguerreotypes, Alma spots another girl, long having undergone rigor mortis and rigidly posed in frame, with a doll by her side. That girl, her sisters tell her, bears her name; their likeness, as with the faceless blur adorning the woman behind her, opens up an eerie maelstrom of ambiguity.
Such ambiguity does not detract from the clarity with which Schilinski articulates the violence and solitude of her characters. Rather, her camera roves through the achronological membrane of memory, sometimes private, sometimes disembodied, from Alma to Erika (Lea Drinda) during the Second World War, to Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the time of the German Democratic Republic, and presently to Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) and her sister Nelly (Zoë Baier). Across time, milieus blend and morph in a recursive flicker, as uncanny parallels — from stray utterances to the patterns of suffering and sexual exploitation — are made to surface. Having been forcibly amputated by his family to avoid the draft of World War One, for example, the invalid Fritz (Filip Schnack) becomes an object of erotic fascination later on by Erika, his niece, as with the housemaid Trudi (Luzia Oppermann), who is sterilized and rendered “safe” for the farmhands. If Robert Zemeckis’ Here attempted such a survey spatially, affixed to a static camera perspective, Sound of Falling does so more through affect and subjectivity, its freefall rhythm recalling the scintillating narratives of Carlos Reygadas and Terrence Malick.
Yet the film remains singular in its use of negatives, whether through the physical imprints of weathered photographs or through the psychic absences and unresolved plot threads which derail it from a more incurious portrait of phenomenological angst. As an inquiry into the very notion of being itself, Sound of Falling sees its characters uneasily situating themselves within their wider world, attempting to peel away the norms and presuppositions of the era, and summarily failing to transcend the brutal reign of rural, male tradition. “What unites all the characters,” Schilinski has said in an interview, “is the longing to exist in this world for once without anything having preceded them,” echoing the literary criticism of Harold Bloom. Just as the poem is, for Bloom, “not an overcoming of anxiety” but that very anxiety itself, Schilinski’s film underscores the search for — and is — a history specifically overlooked by both cultural exigency and the ravages of time. If W.G. Sebald had written On the Natural History of Destruction to span the 20th century, Sound of Falling would be closest to a faithful adaptation of it.
Scoped wider than Schilinski’s debut feature — 2017’s Dark Blue Girl — and burrowing deep into the bones and crevices of its farmhouse, Sound of Falling may most accurately be read as a hauntological work whose ghostly remembrances and subjectivities, courtesy of Fabian Gamper’s oneiric cinematography, become embodied in the dance of film grain, alternately blurring and coming into focus. But who is doing the remembering, exactly? One may arrive at a tentative answer by considering the film’s three titles: the overwhelming bursts of static in the film alludes to its English title, while its German counterpart, In die Sonne schauen (translated as “looking at the sun”), suggests the piercing, blinding gaze with which the women behold and hand down their generational trauma. Arguably, however, it is the film’s original English title, The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feeling Blue, cribbed from a Tom Waits song, that conveys the inexplicable heart and soul of the melancholic disposition. While the nasty, brutish, and sometimes short lives the women lead are directly a product of their oppressive conditions, the film also speaks to a broader existential question. “In truth, I have lived completely in vain” is the sentiment a dime and dozen among the dispossessed, and with Sound of Falling, Schilinski relays it beyond sight and sound, and through the very fiber of memory.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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