Looking with a cynical eye, one might accuse Ildikó Eyendi — and not just in Silent Friend — of banality. The film’s three stories, taken individually, tend toward this descriptor. One: a feminist historical in which an ambitious woman grinds against patriarchal brickheadedness, but triumphs on sheer ability. Two: a boy in love with the wrong kind of girl, who finds real purpose in work and study. Three: two men separated by suspicion and a language barrier who find a way to communicate. Nothing in any of those is revelatory. Each story takes the curve expected. Naturally, communication is the subject: each story’s general idea is that of people failing to adequately express themselves to one another. In the first story we have a woman and her intentions misapprehended by men of the old-fashioned kind; it is therefore a tale of alienation and resilience. In the second story, the girl and the boy share some common frisson but otherwise completely misunderstand one another on an intimate level. In the third story, the distance is compounded not only by language, but also by context: the mysterious behaviors of an Asian man during the Covid pandemic stoke a prejudice that is, ultimately, superstition. The stories are joined by location — they are all set, in 1908, 1972, and 2020, in Marburg University. The parallelism is served by various formal tricks — each film is shot in a different format (monochrome 35mm, color 16mm, and digital respectively) — and by certain repeating objects and locations. Eyendi does not become too fusty or algorithmic in her comparison: this is not, for instance, an anthology of stories centered around the same gingko tree. The tree is essential to one story and passing in the others. Equally, a Goethe text appears in two but not in the third. The possibility for an architectonic rendering of time is passed up. The film is far looser in its course.
The theme of communication is burnished in the subplot of each story, by which each protagonist is a scientist, and each seems to have some interest in understanding the nature of plant life. That there is some flora-fauna connection (described as novel via Linnean categorization in 1908), and that this connection could indicate direct communication (as in 1972); and that this communication might be quantified and translated (as in 2020). There is something of the banality of these stories that perhaps presupposes the idea of progress. Progress invents banality. The antifeminist bollards seem to us immediately outmoded, though their ideas were conventional in their day; the free love of 1972 is no longer shocking; and the Covid hysteria has in the most part died down. In each story, the scientific forward-step is taken for granted in the chronological next: Grete oversteps the illustrations of Goethe to produce intimate (a point made with metaphorical force) close-up images of plant life. There is something individual and personal about nature photography that must elude nature illustration; one seeks to find the general in the specific, whereas the other prefers a more orderly array of exemplars. To treat a plant as a subject, and not merely set decoration, is the ideological breakthrough. This is the claim of Eyendi: that she has inherited Grete’s practice by making the Gingko tree on campus the one character who recurs through each story. Hannes, with Gundula, advances the idea of real, measurable communication between plant and animal life. That it is possible for Hannes, in a somewhat fantastical aside, to develop a more meaningful relationship with an inanimate than with his would-be girlfriend. At the very least: something is being said, and there is some reciprocity between both wings of the natural world. The final segment takes this assumption as granted, but intends to seek out the very specific points of commonality between the floral and faunal experience of the world. Is it possible to really relate to (for instance) a tree; can one empathize with the botanical garden? This may be the steel-tip of that banal feeling: which is to say, everything taken for granted was once remarkable. That we may one day understand, however that can be defined, the language of trees could eventually be seen in the same light. That it was there but unmeasured; one of those now obvious facts that seemed to elude centuries of closely observed science. That is, after all, the purpose and the tragedy of science. It is a policy of progress that regularly unseats what appear to be definite facts. It asks for a curiosity, and for the basic ability to entertain the impossible, for so long as the hypothesis can be tested.
This is then the complementary spiritual idea: that there seems to stem from the human mind a tendency to anthropomorphize the natural world. That trees are sentinels, and flowers eyes, and the seasons life — for as much as Eyendi might give credence to scientific hokum, it appears the idea is in fact set on this upper plane, by which we seem to share something with all life and that we are bound, in some manner, to seek it out. Perhaps this even leads us toward a kind of panpsychism, by which consciousness is shared in by all matter, and life is a complex accrual of this conscious substance. In plant life, the arrangement is different, but perhaps not completely incompatible. In each of the three stories, a psychedelic experience is mooted (though in the middle story it is passed by); in each there is that New Age idea that parts of the brain with which we might better see the world are in a state of recession. But this is familiar material to chew upon. Eyendi’s real quality is in texture, and mood, and editing. These three stories are wound together on a gliding principle, the diegesis moving from one to another not necessarily on a principle of dramatic congruence (though there is a mutual climax), but rather in the way each story moves and stays still. Images of the gingko tree, often its branches and leaves, then resemble the various veins of the film; Eyendi will frequently cut back to the tree in each depicted decade, indicating — with some level of grace — the constant about which these disparate stories perambulate. Like in On Body and Soul, the quality of her imagery is perhaps more intriguing than the narrative she is expressing; there is a sense that this film is perhaps more incisive, or ambitious, than it actually becomes. But to in some way compound a written conceit with more allusive imagery is more interesting than the more common inverse. Eyendi’s most striking image is her last. She begins close to the gingko tree, and draws outward. The branches seem to explode from the trunk, reaching out, much farther than we would anticipate. The slowness of the zoom-out implies movement, and implies time, and implies direction. There is something in the ancient tree, we might call it petrified time, a series of apparent decisions and meanders, made certain for posterity. Perhaps more than any of her mawkish inner-dramas, it is this image — this apparent significance — that pulses through Silent Friend.
Published as part of LFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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