“We wanted to give the characters a chance to gaze back”: Mascha Schilinski on Sound of Falling

Mascha Schilinski’s haunting second feature Sound of Falling, awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes, has seen the Berlin director hailed as an exciting new voice in German cinema. Co-written with Louise Peter and shot by cinematographer Fabian Gamper with images that seem to recall the dead and manufacture illusions for the living, the drama flows back and forth through four generations living in a farmstead in the Altmark region, from just before World War I up to recent times. 

Within this ambitious historical scale, the political cataclysms that have rocked Germany in the last century are evident in the shifts between the households, but Schilinski’s sensibility for the uncanny and the half-erased is more aligned with artists such as American photographer Francesca Woodman than it is with directors like Edgar Reitz and his landmark, epic film series Heimat (1984). Sound of Falling makes paper-thin the line between the hidden and the seen, the remembered and the imagined. 

We spoke to Schilinski just after the film was shortlisted for an Oscar, which she has welcomed as a vindication of sorts for her stubborn insistence on experimentation and telling this story in her own distinctive way. 

I appreciated how you captured the sense that in Germany, with its often catastrophic history, the past is still present in the walls.  

My co-writer and I talked about this idea of place, as well as the transgenerational trauma written into our bodies over time. We found this farm that had been empty for 50 years and decided it would be a good vessel to investigate these questions. You could go through the rooms and see what they all looked like when they were left. It shows you this simultaneity of time. You can be standing in the same room doing something really profane, playing around on your phone, and in that very same room someone in the past or the future could be going through an existential experience.   

We hear the phrase “phantom pains” in the literal context of an amputation in the film, but it’s just as apt for what these generations of women go through. Do you see this as a ghost story? 

This idea of phantom pain was really a metaphor we used. You can see this, for example, in Alma, the seven-year-old girl who lives in the house in 1914, when she asks herself how something can hurt you that isn’t there anymore. It was interesting to us how these things that happened long before we were born have effects on us – these inner quakings, you could say – that bring so much shame to people that they never tell anyone about them, even on their deathbed. As a result, their stories are never passed on and that’s especially true when it comes to women’s stories and maids who were often never taught to read or write. Often, when people think of trauma it is associated with war, but we wanted to focus on the more personal types of trauma that can happen to an individual and still have earth-shattering effects on all aspects of their lives.  

I’d like to talk about gazes, which cross all kinds of boundaries in the film. There’s a lot of secret looking through keyholes and such. And the way the characters break the fourth wall to look at us is eerie — was that a way to connect us across time? 

In the house we shot in, we found a photo from about 1920 of three maids who were looking back at the camera. We were standing probably in the same spot that the photographer would have been. That led us to think about how we are connected to these maids, who are probably dead by now and that we also at some point will no longer be here. Over the past hundred years, there has been a lot of gazing at women, and we wanted to give the characters a chance to gaze back. What’s maybe even more important to us is this idea of memory and how memory and imagination work together. Images that you have in your head that you’ve never actually seen yourself can become memories when you think back on them. The film is a meditation on the unreliability of memory. The women in the film, through memory, have a way of communicating with each other.

Photography as a way to remember people who are disappearing looms large. I was struck by the uncanny family photographs with dead relatives. 

I was fascinated by these post-mortem photos as a symbol of memory culture. In rural areas at that time, people couldn’t afford photographers but they did want to remember their dead, so when somebody died, they would bring one in to capture their memory once that person was dead and would create this image of the dead person as if they were still alive, surrounded by the living. But the living people tend to appear more like ghostly figures, because the exposure time of the cameras was so long that they end up wriggling around a bit, whereas the dead person ends up being in extremely sharp focus. What also fascinated us was that this is a memory of something that never really happened and that is the thing that lives on.

Did you look at many photographs as research, beyond the one you mentioned finding? I read that Francesca Woodman’s work was an inspiration. 

My DOP Fabian Gamper and I were extremely interested in photography for this film and ended up looking at loads of photos from the house, the village and the whole region. And we used Francesca Woodman as a reference because we couldn’t find any inspiration from cinema itself. We were focusing so much on this idea of how memory feels, how we remember the face of a loved one when its details have started to fade. In the film of course what we see is very important, but even more important are the things that we don’t see, and the things that have been suppressed in order to enable people to survive. Francesca Woodman, in a certain way, was very lucid about this, and even anticipated her own suicide in her ghostly photographs. It matched the mental image that I had the best, so I could work together with my departments to transmit that into the film’s aesthetic.  

There is a real sense in the film of bodies that people have no control over and a sense of disembodiment as a kind of liberation…  

My co-writer and I discussed this idea of being betrayed by your own body. The character Angelika mentions it in the film, when she says that your face will turn red even though you’re trying to keep a secret from getting out, exactly the thing that you don’t want to show to anyone, because society has trained you to hide these things out of danger. We were also struck by the idea that you can go through life as a proxy for previous generations who have had things happen to them that they cannot quite put a name to and that they weren’t able to negotiate thoroughly themselves. We asked if this could be passed down to other generations, in phenomena that can’t quite be explained, though I am not trying to be paranormal about this.

The film deals with what the bodies of these women are forced to deal with and the various survival strategies that they come up with. Something that we found in doing our research for the film was the very pragmatic nonchalance with which a lot of the women used to describe the violent things that were happening to them. They would talk about it in the same way that they would talk about hanging out the laundry or doing the cooking or the operations on the farm. It was merciless pragmatism, which was quite shocking to us and fed into the tone of the film.

The soundscape is also very distinctive. Can you discuss the choice of this staticky, non-naturalistic crackling that recurs? 

I knew right away how I wanted the sound to be. I have a bit of an audio imagination. I wanted the sound at some points to anticipate what is happening, and to evoke a memory or thought that the characters are trying to suppress. Often when the women break the fourth wall what you get in response from the universe comes in the form of sound. Sound also acts as a harbinger of trauma, because people may deal with it by splintering and compartmentalising it, to sounds over here, or a scrap of image over there, so that it isn’t as overwhelming, rather than saving it as an entire phenomenon intact. When I worked with my sound team, especially Billie Mind, we asked ourselves questions such as, what does a black hole sound like? What does it sound like when you’re a thousand metres below sea level? What did the Big Bang sound like? 

This is being talked about in Berlin as one of the most exciting German films of recent years, and now has a flurry of global awards attention. In what ways do you see this success changing your relationship to filmmaking? 

The increased visibility is a massive gift, not just for me but for everyone who worked on the film with me over the past six years. At the beginning of this year I became a mother, so I’ve been doing all of this travelling around with the baby, and Fabian Gamper, who is my husband, so it’s become a bit of a family business at this point. What I hope down the road is that this will open more doors, because it wasn’t easy to make this film. Some people really tried to discourage me, because it wasn’t a classic film with a classic protagonist told in three acts. It has its own dramaturgical course and had a lot of ideas that were much more literary that we were trying to express. Since the success of the film other filmmakers have reached out to me and told me that they now have the courage to adhere to their own vision, to use a different narrative style, and that is something that really makes me the happiest of all. I resisted the discouragement and stuck to my own vision. The fact that that has worked out for me is very healing and very liberating.  

 ► Sound of Falling is in UK cinemas 6 March.