Helena Wittmann is likely best known for her feature-length narrative films Drift and Human Flowers of Flesh, but she has been making small-scale, idiosyncratic shorts for over a decade, often working as her own cinematographer. Her newest film, A Thousand Waves Away, is only 10 minutes long, but it’s a mysterious, evocative bit of abstraction, conjuring a strange interior universe via minimal means. Set to an incessant, droning loop by musician Nika Son (an electronica artist who has worked on almost all of Wittmann’s films), titled Indefinite Cupboard, the film is a series of mostly static shots of human figures performing ritualistic activities in a wooded area surrounding a waterfall. A series of interstitial title cards act as a sort of accompanying poem (or song lyrics), suggesting hints of a narrative shape that never actually coalesces. The first title card reads “a thousand waves… ago” and is followed by a shot of hands picking flowers, then a silent, motionless figure standing amidst the trees. There are several closeups of hands, legs, feet, the compositions arranged so that the edges of the frame cut off large swaths of the figure’s body. One shot features a pinecone “falling up” into someone’s hand, followed by another title card that reads “in a place where much… no longer made sense.”
Here, then, is a place where cause and effect are seemingly reversed, and as the musical accompaniment grows louder and faster, the film begins to take on the patina of a horror exercise. But Wittmann’s lovely images are too inviting to be labeled scary; shooting on what appears to be 16mm film, there’s a very particular quality to the light here, an unforced naturalism that runs counter to the Bressonian models on display. The greens and reds of the foliage are rich, even lustrous. Pools of water reflect shimmering light, and closeups of rocky, granite-like textures are so detailed one feels like they could run their hand over them. At one point, one of the performers hears an airplane flying by offscreen and looks up; the film cuts to an image of a cloudy, opaque color field that one first assumes is the sky. But Wittmann holds the image long enough for viewers to discern that it is the surface of a lake. A simple enough trick of continuity firing, but it is uncanny in its effect.
Eventually, one of the figures begins traversing a path away from this space, first passing a bronze statue and then, finally, encountering civilization, represented here by a large park with an ornate fountain and several large buildings visible in the background. Is the person merely passing through? Are they running away from something or toward something? It’s hard to say. A Thousand Waves Away is as fixated on water as both Drift and Human Flowers of Flesh are, as a kind of freeform visual metaphor that takes on multiple meanings in her various works, but much like Angela Schanelec (who Wittmann is sometimes compared to), she never gives in to total experimentation, instead referencing various (mostly Structuralist) influences and erecting her own strange scaffolding around them. Waves ends with closeups of a strange sculptural object spinning in front of a black background, its various spherical protrusions reflecting glints of golden light across the frame as water drips from it. It’s lovely, a beguiling moment, these flickers of light dancing and refracting into abstraction. She then cuts to a pair of hands, the dancing golden light framed in between them to appear as if the hands are summoning them, or perhaps commanding or containing them. It is, ultimately, a strange ritual that we are witnessing, as if Wittmann is inviting us to experience a moment we cannot fully comprehend. This is a sketch of a film, a trifle even, but like many experimental shorts it allows us access to something like an artist’s thought process playing out almost in real time. Unburdened by the logistics of creating a feature-length project, instead we are given this odd, beautiful alchemy.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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