Cinema as a ghost machine: In the German Oscar entry «Looking into the Sun», traumas endure over time

In the early days of photography, ghosts often visited family portraits. This was due to the long exposure times. People who moved in or out of the frame during the shot later appeared as pale silhouettes on the print. This is all the more spooky when it comes to so-called post-mortem photographs, those images of deceased family members that were frequently taken in Western cultures until World War II.

This eerie effect appears several times in Mascha Schilinski's internationally acclaimed second feature film, "Looking into the Sun." It offers a visual counterpart, in a sense, for her cinematic approach, which contradicts the usual modes of narrative cinema. Like these ghosts, inexplicable moods sometimes linger between the images. Time doesn't pass chronologically here; it persists as an echo in the rooms of a farm in the Altmark region of northern Saxony-Anhalt, where the entire film is set.

Layers of the unprocessed lie nestled in the barn, the bedroom, by the river, and in the fields. For Schilinski, the rubble of German history is a trauma traveling through time. The film interweaves four time levels on the farm, with women always at the center. Daughters trying to get closer to the physical and brutal secrets of the world, mothers who suffer and cannot hide it. The people leave, but their pain remains.

There's the girl Alma, who, on the eve of the First World War, is confronted with her own mortality after believing she recognizes herself as a dead man in a photograph. She also witnesses Fritz, the farm's son, fall from the barn loft while being chased by his parents. His leg has to be amputated. Later, it becomes clear that the family had thus saved him from being deployed.

Years later, during World War II, Erika limps across the farmyard. She pretends she's lost a leg like her uncle Fritz, to whom she feels an erotic attraction. She touches the naked man's navel and gazes at his stump with fascination. In the 1980s, the farm is located in East Germany. Her daughter, Angelika, wants to live and love with all her might, yet teeters on the brink of suicide. Like all the characters, her relationship with her own mother is strained. There's a lack of love, a lack of joy in life; something has gone missing.

In another scene, a girl hides in a tree. She screams, but no one hears her. These images define the film; they function like vignettes that capture a mood. In the present, there is the young Lenka, plagued by nightmares and a sense of horror simmering beneath the surface, while her family renovates the old farm. A century passes. There are suicides, accidents, and breakdowns. In candlelit, sepia-toned rooms, a meditation on transgenerational trauma unfolds, connected by motifs and gazes.

This isn't about a psychologically charged exploration of the reasons for the women's traumas. These are simply present when the men slap the women, stare at them for too long, or ignore them. It's about an attempt to make these essentially invisible processes tangible through cinematic means. Occasionally, the symbolistically tinged somberness seems overly forced, for example, when a protagonist lies down in the grass next to a dead deer and another impending suicide is presented with excessive pathos.

But that's the way it is with wounds that spread if left untreated. The nightmarish quality of the stories pushes the film to the brink of folk horror; the images tremble, and one can never feel safe. A sophisticated play with overlapping subjective perspectives completely dissolves the boundaries between memory, imagination, reality, and premonition. One doesn't always know who's looking, or the view is blocked. Memory is deceptive.

The film, submitted by Germany for an Oscar, works with blurs, darkness, and images that appear suddenly but only make sense much later. Fabian Gamper's camerawork is remarkable; his digital images are filled with a vibrant flickering that one normally only associates with analogue footage. The crackling and popping of the soundtrack also contribute to this; the film is a full-bore evocation of cinema as a ghost machine.

The gaze travels through time and space. Sometimes someone senses someone looking at them and doesn't let on. This has to do, on the one hand, with the patriarchal power structures at court, and, on the other, with the forces at work here, even though they are unseen. German cinema would do well to view such films not as a successful venture, but as a fundamental requirement for artistically successful cinema.

“Looking into the Sun”: In the cinema.