“And when people ask me: ‘How was it, then?’, I say ‘Nothing’”. The woman who utters this sentence, motionless in front of the camera, starts climbing the steps of a staircase, soon joined by another woman, then a third. Eventually, six women and one man, all dressed in the same white tunic, climb up and down the stairs that lead nowhere: bare, geometric elements of the set, spread throughout the huge, equally bare and geometric interior space of a modern industrial architecture. At times, the bodies come to a halt, in turns, then start going up or down the stairs again with the same solemn, rhythmic pace. Land ohne Worte is the cinematic translation of a text by German playwright Dea Loher: a woman painter meditates on her art, on art and its history, and more specifically on the possibilities and impossibilities for art to represent the reality of a violent, war-torn world. Originally a first-person monologue, here the text is shared out among seven performers, who take turns reciting it. This principle of fragmentation and multiplication affects all the elements of the film: the character is divided into seven bodies, faces and voices; the set elements; directing and cutting, subject to an infinite variation of viewpoints and shot scales. Which art? Why art? What to paint? Redoing Hockney with crippled bodies? Knives appear in hands or stuck into stairs: to skin the bodies, to self-harm, to tear up canvases? Words endlessly unfolding the same concern, a land without words: what this dense, austere, impressive film questions is the very possibility of describing, naming, representing the reality of a world where “every recognizable thing disappears.” Antoinette Zwirchmayr has created nothing less than a contemporary version of Piranesi’ Imaginary prisons. Prisons described by Marguerite Yourcenar as “a world that is fake and yet eerily real, claustrophobic and yet megalomaniac, reminiscent of the one to which modern humanity confines itself more and more each day…” Here we are.
Cyril Neyrat
