Down, and Down: Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling

"And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down —

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing — then —"
—Emily Dickinson

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, it was common practice to photograph the dead—especially when the dead was a child—arranging the corpse like they were still alive, even gathering everyone around them in a final family portrait. These theatrical tableaux of group relationships that have recently been obliterated contain and attest to both the singed and tattered remnants of that groupness, and the roaring flame of its obliteration. That which was, and that which isn’t, in a single frame. The images are evidence of love, and love’s failure: its fundamental inability to keep and protect.

As our era of funerary ritual has made a long turn toward the antiseptic, the administrative, the mannered, and the phobic, these portraits now display a discomfiting familiarity with the fleshliness of the deceased, and they welcome unabashed artifice in the face of evident, annihilative reality. This reads, to the contemporary viewer, as fascinating, germy, and delusional. It reads as contaminative, gothic, the stuff of horror tropes. Death is no longer so intimate, so domestic—or rather, in new Western traditions, we have our own germ of delusion: We like to pretend mortality can be banished from our homes. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay, “The Storyteller,” “There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died.” Living spaces were also death spaces; they provided a spatial understanding of time, and of our finite position within it. “Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity…” I had to look up “dry dweller”: trockenwohner, in German, were working-class renters in turn-of-the-century Berlin, who resided in newly built tenements before they became legally habitable, paying a reduced rate during the months it took for the lime mortar walls to dry out. For Benjamin, these still-damp walls signify a type of mildewed modernity. We perch, he infers, in the insufficient shelter of our historical moment, displaced from our own endings, and denied the lucidity those endings might bring. In these postmortem photographs, due to the long exposure time, the dead person is often the clearest part of the image. The living breathe, rustle, fidget, and, consequentially, blur.

In Mascha Schilinski’s masterwork, Sound of Falling (2025), the walls are bone-dry. Set in a single house in Germany’s rural Altmark region over the span of a century, the film slips in and out of the experiences of four young girls who dwell there, separated by decades, moving between the 1910s, the 1940s, the 1980s, and the current day. The house metaphorizes time as a four-sided farmstead: rooted, enclosed, watchful, ouroboric. The silt of individual lives collects and compacts there, like the striations of deep sedimentary rock. The girls—Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka—are never in direct contact with each other, never in the same timescale, but they share the same space-scale, falling into the psychic ruts and wakes carved by those there before them. They unknowingly reflect each other’s gestures, sayings, intimacies, and sufferings. Are they remembering or imagining? Are these glitches of sameness a form of communication, a silent language? Or perhaps a language for the silenced? I’ve sensed it in my own life, at times: mothers and daughters blinking at each other across the vast distance of history, specks of meaningful light appearing and disappearing in the fog.

In Sound of Falling, the camera is a curious ghost, peeking around doorways, eavesdropping conversations, detached from chronology. The cinematographer Fabian Gamper ingeniously created this effect by jumbling and obscuring the implicit filmic cues that fix a viewer in time: placing a pinhole camera on a flying drone, switching between various lenses in a single scene, or closing his fingers momentarily over the shot while hovering on a Steadicam, creating “a kind of reddish light through the blood of [his] hand,” as if the audience is looking through closed eyes. Sometimes, the girls seem to know the camera is there, staring straight into it the way one might peer into the darkness, feeling a presence. Sometimes, it almost seems to be a coconspirator in their mischief and play, like an imaginary friend. 

Plot, if one could call it that, reveals itself through slow-growing entwinement. Rather than presenting a cast of characters in order to watch them maneuver a mutual situation, the film presents gauzy shreds of pure situation, imagistic and ungrouped. Over time, the nature and conditions of the group fill in around the seemingly alienated characters. Relationship, instead of being the narrative catalyst, is its tentative conclusion. By smudging the contours of inheritance, Schilinski expands the category of death portraiture, radiating outward from the original homespun image practice, which serves as a visual anchor for the film. The narrative restages memory and memorials in repetitive cycles, exploring their strange pleasures, that fleshliness and artifice that our particular century has effortfully rejected. Ultimately, Sound of Falling tells the story not of the still clarity of the corpse, but of the blur, the unfocused streak of girlhood: a testament to brief aliveness and the evasion of capture.

*

Looking at the photographs of her loved ones, after placing them in a tender display on the living room dresser, a mother stands back, admires, and gags. This scene is shot through a keyhole, from the perspective of her seven-year-old daughter Alma, and it almost feels like the little girl is peeping into the future, seeing her grown self on the other side of the locked door. Their tight braids mirror each other. Alma’s mother could be Whistler’s Mother, minus a few decades, hidden in a black lake of fabric, tinged with lace like moonlit foam. Though only in her forties, she clenches her jaw with a masseter of the ancients. It is All Souls’ Day, a feast to honor the imperfect dead (the most of us), and a time to pray for their swift passage through purgatory. Alma has been given a new black dress, and she smooths it down, pressing it flat against her small body in awe. On the dresser, there is a photograph of a little girl who looks exactly like Alma, in the same dress, but slumped and inanimate. The girl is held up for display by the foggy scaffold of an obscured woman. Later, after a solemn family dinner, a rowdy celebration, and a stumbling off to bed, the various daughters of the house sneak down to the first floor to reexamine the altar of the departed. Alma recognizes the blur as her mother. The girl in the photograph is named Alma, too. “But I’m Alma,” Alma whispers. “Perhaps you are not yourself, but her,” the sisters tease.

Where does the body begin and end? When does the self enclose, cut off from the world around it, and when does it open, become penetrable, indistinct, or collective? Which Alma are you? Sound of Falling returns to these questions with a sustained rhythm, thumbing them like prayer beads. The borderlands of the body—the disputed territory between me-ness and you-ness—are mapped with an almost topographical detail: a secret taste of the sweat that pools inside a belly button, the stump of an amputated leg that is still wracked with phantom pains, even the simple transfer of heat from one body to another. “Warm.” The word repeats in the mouths of many different characters, as they feel the flicker of someone else’s body within their own. It almost serves as a verbal talisman, carried through decades: a wife pressing her husband’s flaccid penis to her forehead in a quiet act of marital intimacy, or a roughhousing teenager licking her own blood from the cheek of her enamored cousin, or a curious daughter climbing into the vacant imprint her sister has made in their shared bed. Two things are being passed between bodies and across time—warmth, the feeling, and “Warm,” the word. Warmth is also a distinguishing characteristic between the alive and the dead, an easy way to know which one you are. It’s as if the characters are constantly searching for reassurance that they are still in this world, and not the underworld, as if they might have slipped and fallen into a shadow realm, unnoticed. As if they might be the Alma in the photograph, instead of the Alma in the room: a memory, instead of a person. “Warm,” then, becomes an announcement: still here, soft dick, still here, bloody face, still here, empty bed. 

“Still here,” too, can refer to the leg that is no longer attached to the torso but remains felt in the form of agony, or the trauma that might have been buried with one family member appearing starkly in the unplaceable behavior of their descendants. “Haunting” is also a way to describe a kind of still-here-ness, something’s ability to drift past its own edge. Boundaries are less clear-cut than we might wish, imagine, or fear. The river Elbe slices through the agricultural land by the farmhouse, and it transforms throughout the film: in one time, it is a river, and in another, it is a border, and in another, it is a mass grave. In the 1980s, it both separates and connects the GDR and West Germany, a scar buried deep underwater. It is unclear—literally invisible and also unagreed upon—where the divide between this place and that place occurs. (West Germany maintained the border was the eastern shore; the GDR maintained the border was at the thalweg, the squiggly line of lowest elevation in the middle of the river.) Schilinski lingers in this immersed and sunken place: a site, inhospitable to human bodies, of both political wounding and children’s play. To the girls of now, the river is simply a local recreation spot, a stage for adolescent angst and summertime languor. They drop themselves into the depths with theatrical effort, pretend-drowning, unaware that they are play-acting deaths that actually occurred in the same gray current. In the water, like in the photograph, they blur.

*

Sound of Falling feels both entirely new and sincerely indebted to other practices; it’s as if Francesca Woodman lived, grew up, and adapted a Jenny Erpenbeck novel into a film. What a heartbreaking counterfactual—to remember that Woodman, the lyrical self-portrait photographer who died by suicide at 22 years old, would only be 67 today. Her style is instantly recognizable: body as haze inside a decomposing domestic space; a flurry of motion next to a prop as loaded as a gun; a shard of leg, a curled spine, doubled and veiled by murky glass. Because Woodman’s work can seem so stormy and elemental, almost organic—and because her skill and authorship is consistently elided as a young woman artist—it’s often unacknowledged how explicitly staged her photographs are. For all their ghostliness, they are the opposite of candid, verging on the dramaturgical. Sound of Falling shares this theatricality, as the girls experiment with posture, exposure, and concealment, testing the limits of their self-presentation and self-mastery. Lying upside down on a rusty patio swing, Angelika wonders why she cannot simply will her heart to stop, the same way she can lift her leg, or open her mouth: “Maybe I’m not deciding hard enough, just in case it does obey.” Similarly bewildered by her own survival, Alma privately restages the photograph of the other, dead Alma. She carefully tilts her foot just so, arranging her body into the same pose, on the same couch, in the same dress, as if she might slide cleanly out of herself, join the other Alma in nonexistence, or image-existence. You can’t die by mimicry alone, but that won’t stop a girl from trying.

Why try? In some ways, Sound of Falling follows four children realizing their own status as girls: the sudden onset of gender that arises when the atmospheric sexual violence of our world becomes abruptly personal, almost overnight. It is also about their respective mothers (some of the most astounding performances in the film), who cannot shield them from this becoming. Much changes over the century depicted—clothing, religion, class, war, agriculture, technology, nation—but the ubiquity of that violence does not. (I highly commend Schilinski for her choice to show the fullness of this reality without a single rape scene.) If you do not own your own body, if you cannot control how it is treated or who has access to it, then questions of edges, boundaries, beginnings, and endings plunge out of the philosophical and fall, with great heaviness, on raw, real experience. The desire to overlap with someone else, to join selves with other girls, to obliterate, to obscure, to disappear, to blur—the stakes of images become life or death. In an interview, Schilinski described her wish to represent a “stream of consciousness” in cinema: “We wanted to create the feeling that they were all remembering at the same time.” I paused there. A collective memory of those excluded from traditional historical narrative, told out of order and in chorus, merging the dreamt, the staged, and the real into a story of the twentieth century across a single matrilineal network. There might be another word for that—all of us remembering at the same time. I think, in a certain light, I would call it “feminism.”

Audrey Wollen is a writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, Harper's Magazine, Bookforum, The Nation, and others.