New posts from jordanlee.life
🍿 Sound of Falling (2025) - Directed by Mascha Schilinski
A small pleasure among the many indignities of freelancing in NYC is using my movie pass to see a free matinee movie in the middle of the week. Most recently I saw Sound of Falling, the loosely intertwined and century-spanning story of a German farmhouse and the generations of girls who grew up there.
The movie also functions as a haunting, with the viewer not able to initially discern exactly how the disjointed timeline relates to itself or whether there are supernatural elements or simply historical reverberations. A running theme is the casual violence of the male gaze which leads to an atmosphere of dread not just permeating the dank 1900’s cellars but also sunny open fields.
In the 149 minute runtime director Mascha Schilinski develops vivid sensual languages. Eschewing a soundtrack or score, Falling still uses sound quite effectively by pulling it away to develop tension then homing in on a single element like a pig eating or fly buzzing. Through the lighting we see how drastically society has changed in this century. The farmhouse is introduced as a candlelit semi-feudal agricultural dwelling for a family and servants at the onset of World War One, then followed all the way to the present where a Berlin family seems to have picked it out as a country fixer-upper project.
I left the theater thinking this movie was long, bleak, and really well done and tried to get my frayed nerves to feel normal again. But waking up this morning I could not stop thinking about it. I think my dreaming brain had been mulling it over all night, finding more connections, thinking about how the sense of touch was portrayed, noticing the brilliant rhythm of the sequencing of scenes.
The foregrounding of the German farmhouse and my reaction to this movie itself reminded me of the book The Poetics of Space where French philosopher Gaston Bachelard uses the analogy of rooms of a house for how we store memory and impression in the subconscious. He makes an argument that certain art, like poetry, can bypass the language-based brain, enter the house of the subconscious, affect the reader, and then re-emerge back out into the consciousness in a translated yet diminished state.
Although it was a difficult watch I’m ultimately glad to have allowed my inner house to be haunted by Sound of Falling.
Dialect - Full Serpent (RVNG / 2026)
I really enjoyed the last Dialect album Atlas of Green and was pleasantly surprised to see a new EP announcement. The music sits somewhere between the emotional glitches of The Books and the whimsy of the Katamari Damacy soundtrack. Highly recommended!
📚 On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) by Solvej Balle (New Directions 2024)
I just finished the first of seven books about an antique bookseller stuck in a single repeating day and her attempts to understand and escape her absurd situation. The author first crossed my radar from a hilarious New York Times profile where the reporter visited her isolated house in Denmark and mentioned a box labeled “Things” and another labeled “And Some Other Things”. Relatable.
I found myself needing to be in the right mood to absorb the deluge of mundane details of hundreds of the same day yet eventually I was fully pulled in and feeling the mood swings of the protagonist. Or rather the slow transition of how she looked at herself and the untethering from rhythms we take for granted. I’ll probably take a little break and pick up the next book soon. It also reminded me how much I’d like to read Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time to continue this theme of temporality, mundanity, and profundity.
I was very much inspired by a profile on the Robida Collective in Are.na. Named after the brambles that come up first after a field is abandoned, the collective is headquartered in a village on the Italy / Slovenia border and share my preoccupation with margins, ecological art, community radio.
