52 Films by Women Vol 9. 24. Sound of Falling (In die Sonne schauen) (Director: Mascha Schilinski)
What we
remember and what we document are two different things. Co-writer-director
Mascha Schilinski’s second feature, In die Sonne schauen,
retitled in English, Sound of Falling, could equally be
re-titled, ‘If a Picture’. Photographs are a recurring motif, but these feature
a figure seeking to escape who appears blurred in front of the camera.
Photographs are intended as keepsakes, reminders of a particular time. However,
in Schilinski’s film, they seem disconnected from reality because the unity or
family feeling they seek to project is absent. The look at the camera tells us
nothing about the subject’s turmoil. The more people feature in the photograph,
the more there might be clues. However, family photographs remain stubbornly
two dimensional.
Schilinski’s film obeys only one of Aristotle’s three unities: the unity of place. The action is set in a large farmhouse in East Germany which, as far as I could tell, wasn’t handed down to successive generations within the film’s one-hundred-year timeline. The other unities of time and action are ignored. Schilinski doesn’t offer us anything as trite as ‘the sins of the past are doomed to be repeated in the present’. Context determines behaviour. But to what extent does context offer an excuse?
Descriptions of Sound of Falling mention four periods in which the film takes place. I could only separate out three. Of those three, only two are dramatically memorable. Reflecting on the film, I asked myself, why doesn’t the film solely concern itself with one family or one time period? Why does Schilinski insist on repeatedly taking us out of the narrative, much like the subjects themselves seeking to escape? Does Schilinski’s stylistic choice make for a more satisfying film?
My answer, at least on first viewing, is no. There was a moment, about twenty minutes before the end, when I felt so disconnected from what I was watching that I just wanted the film to finish. Some directors use ‘unpleasure’, the quality of deliberately dissatisfying the audience, for an aesthetic purpose. You should be dissatisfied in order to contribute to societal change in the (so-called) ‘real world’. Sometimes this represents a breach of trust between filmmaker and audience. A filmmaker poses a series of questions that their work proceeds to address. ‘Address’ rather than answer. ‘Resolution’ involves signifiers of closure. The characters undertake a journey then return home having learnt something. But do people ever learn?
The answer to the question, ‘why does the film not stay in one time period’ appears to be, because one time period is insufficient to understand human behaviour. Moreover, one ‘point of view’ is insufficient to understand motivation. In the end, as in a murder mystery or a morality tale, motivation doesn’t justify the action taken.
Presented in the narrow Academy ratio (1.33 width to 1.00 height), Sound of Falling begins in the second decade of the twentieth century with a young maid, later identified as Erika (Lea Drinda) propelling herself down a corridor on crutches with her left leg apparently missing. We hear her name being called to tend to some pigs. She does not respond. We don’t know if she is the one being summoned. She enters a room raises her long skirt. She unties the rope around her left leg which falls, boot still on it, to the ground. The owner of the crutches, a young man, Fritz (Filip Schnack) lies in bed, apparently asleep. The bottom of his left leg, below the knee, is missing, now a healed stump. His chest is uncovered. Erika reaches for Fritz’s belly button and presses it. It leaks water, suggesting a recent bath. Fritz’s eyes remain closed. Erika enters the courtyard. The man calling for her slaps her face.
As openings go, it grabs your attention. The following scene is no slouch either. In it, an older maid, Berta (Bärbel Schwarz) leaves the house having switched from indoor slip-on clogs to outdoor ones. Whilst she is outside, a trio of giggling girls nail her indoor clogs to the floor. Berta slips into her indoor clogs, tries to walk and falls forward, disappearing from view. The girls’ laughter shifts to concern. Is Berta, seen lying on the floor, dead? Happily not. The old woman gets up and chases the three girls. Schilinski’s camera follows them round various rooms, finally choosing to follow the youngest, Alma (Hanna Heckt). Alma stops and peers through the gap in a three-quarters closed door. Her mother who otherwise does not speak but periodically retches, is displaying some photographs on a cabinet. It is All Souls’ Day. The family is required to pay respects to their ancestors.
In these two set pieces, Schilinski introduces thematic elements: forbidden desire, brutality, obedience and mischief, and the relationship between the present and the past. The rest of the film intermittently matches the power of these opening scenes, mostly notably when the corpse of a young woman has her eyelids sewn open so that she can feature in a photograph as if still alive. For much of the film’s length, Schilinski holds her audience in a tight clasp. By the end, this weakens considerably.
Pictured: Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in a scene from the German farmhouse drama, 'In die Sonne schauen' (English title, 'Sound of Falling'), co-written and directed by Mascha Schilinski. Still courtesy of Studio Zentral (Germany)
Moving back and forth between time periods, Schilinski shifts between realities – ways of living – that vary in harshness. The contemporary scenes hold far less interest than those set in the 1910s and 1970s. Two characters stand out. Young Alma who is obsessed by a photograph in which her mother appears to be blurred. Teenage Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), who manipulates but wishes to escape her lustful uncle. In one scene, she wants him to drive her to Glöwisch so she can go dancing. He refuses. The family is convinced she is sleeping with him; Angelika doesn’t silence the rumours. Her cousin, Rainer (Florian Geißelmann) is jealous. There is a sense of peril and self-destruction. In one scene, a young woman out helping a relative with the harvest – he is operating the combine harvester, she has a set of flags – lies down out of sight next to a dead animal. The harvester gets ever closer to her. There is a cut to black. This is presented as a fantasy sequence. We next see the young woman holding her flags. We wonder about the desire for self-destruction. At the climax of the film, in the 1910s, Alma’s older sister is forcibly engaged to an older farmer to save the family from ruin after a bad harvest. She exercises her dissent through a fall.
Pictured: Before she decides to lie down in a cornfield, a young woman assists with the harvest in a scene from the German farmhouse drama, 'In die Sonne schauen' (English title, 'Sound of Falling'), co-written and directed by Mascha Schilinski. Still courtesy of Studio Zentral (Germany)
In one of the contemporary scenes, a mother decides to remodel using a heavy mallet. Her young daughter befriends an older girl who lives with a neighbouring family. The older girl isn’t keen to go home. We wonder about her home life, which Schilinski, sticking to the unity of place, doesn’t show.
Cruelty is normalised. During the celebrations for All Souls’ Day, Berta has a sack placed over her head. Her sexual mistreatment is described through voiceover. Berta cannot bear children. A young woman is taken away and, it is implied, sterilised, so she too cannot give birth. However, one proposed act of violence is carried out for compassionate reasons, evidenced by the appearance of recruiters, whose presence enables the audience to situate the scene as taking place during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II. While the planned act of violence does not take place, there is another fall, described as a ‘work accident’.
You wonder why Schilinski did not set any scenes during the Nazi era. Is it because their cruelty has already been sufficiently documented and might be considered – wishfully – as a historical anomaly? Any historical film that airbrushes out Nazism is potentially dangerous by pretending that well-documented crimes against humanity did not exist. Schilinski is not spared this charge.
There are two family photographs taken during the film, one with a Polaroid camera featuring a blur, the other featuring a corpse presented as still alive. Photographs, we conclude, are unreliable records of events. What we don’t see in the film is as important as what is shown. I cannot conclude that I made sense of the film, which at certain points privileges voiceover above what we see and images above explanation. In one scene, a young woman takes out a man’s penis and points it at her forehead. Discuss.
Reviewed at BFI South Bank, Screen One, South London, Monday 29 September 2025, 10:00am, London Film Festival Press & Industry Screening
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