Gazing at the Sun: Caesura, the Female Gaze, and the Historiography of Wounds in Masha Schilinski’s “In die Sonne schauen/The Sound of Falling”

The sun is the only thing in the world whose sight one cannot bear… Inner experience is the opposite of action. Nothing more.

— Georges Bataille, L’Espérance Intérieure

The Name as Threshold [1]

The film defeated me three times before I could watch it through. Each attempt left something on the skin — not an idea, not even an image, but a sensation closer to abrasion, as though the screen had grazed me with the wrong side of some fabric not meant for male hands. Only on the fourth attempt did I manage to stay, and then once more, to consolidate what I had seen and to submit to what I had felt in a cleaner order. I mention this not as biographical trivia but as a phenomenological datum. Any serious encounter with Masha Schilinski’s “In die Sonne schauen/The Sound of Falling” must begin with the acknowledgment that the film actively resists a certain kind of viewer and that this resistance is philosophically productive.

What resists, precisely? The existing criticism offers two hypotheses, both inadequate. The first is the aestheticist retreat: the film must be felt, not understood; its non-linear narration suspends rationality; analysis is unwelcome. This is intellectual capitulation dressed as sensitivity. The second is the domesticated feminist reading: the film is “about” female experience, trauma, and the body, a cinematic contribution to gender discourse, to be filed alongside its proper hashtags. This is ideology dressed as interpretation. Both responses share a common defect: they arrive at the film already knowing what it is. Neither pauses at the threshold.

And the threshold is the name. The original German title—In die Sonne schauen, “Gazing at the Sun”—is not a metaphor; it is an instruction. More precisely, it is the opening gesture of a ritual: the act of solar contemplation, of directing the gaze toward the source of light that is also the source of blindness. When an artist titles a work of this magnitude, and this is, beyond any reasonable doubt, a work of high art, the name is an incantation, the first word of a liturgy. Schilinski names the sun, and in naming it, she opens the space of a rite.

The international title, The Sound of Falling, refers to certain scenes within the film—the sister who slides from the hay cart to her death, the bodies that enter the river and do not emerge—but it conceals the solar dimension. I suspect this concealment is itself ritualistic. Many sacred traditions veil the true name of the god. The English title is the public face; the German is the esoteric one. Those who enter through The Sound of Falling will find a film about women and history, which, of course, it is. Those who enter through In die Sonne schauen will find a film about the female gaze directed at the male principle of the cosmos: at Apollo, at the sun, at the historical time that men have built and that women have survived.

This distinction between the female and the feminist is the essay’s first provocation, and it must be stated plainly. Schilinski’s film is not feminist in any recognizable ideological sense. It does not argue. It does not advocate. It does not position itself within the discourse of rights, recognition, or representation. What it does is something far more radical and far more ancient: it looks, it gazes, and it introspects. It turns the female gaze upon the sun, that is, upon history, war, violence, paternity, the structures of power and duration that men have erected. And in that looking, it discovers a temporality, a metaphysics, and an ontology that no feminist theory has seemingly yet articulated. The film enacts what I will call, for want of a better term, a female metaphysics of historical time. We do not yet have a philosophy adequate to what Schilinski has shown us. This essay is an attempt to begin one.

I was reminded, watching the film, of a book I encountered as an adolescent: Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War. There, too, the point was not feminism but the specifically female gaze: how war, mass death, and catastrophe are experienced from the standpoint of the mother, the grandmother, the girl-child. Not as ideology but as perception, a different sensorium, and a different relation to the flesh. In Schilinski’s film, this gaze is directed upward, at the sun, at the Apollonian, at the masculine. And the viewer who is male, which means who is accustomed to being the one who looks, suddenly finds himself looked at. The discomfort I felt through three failed viewings was precisely this: the vertigo of being seen from a position I had never inhabited. The imaginary scratches on my skin were the marks of a gaze that did not ask for my consent.

The cinematography enacts this reversal with deliberate precision. The camera repeatedly commits what any photography instructor would call an amateur’s error: it shoots against the sun, floods the frame with solar flares, and tilts the horizon. But within the film’s logic, these are not errors; they are acts of worship. The sun is not the background; it is the protagonist. It enters the frame as the men enter the lives of the women—radiant, blinding, inescapable, and finally destructible. The sun, too, can be outlived. The women of this film have outlived many suns.

And so we enter: not through plot, not through argument, but through the act of phenomenological looking at what should not be looked at: through the ritual that the title names and the film performs. What follows is an attempt to think inside that ritual, to trace the philosophy that Schilinski has woven into her four stories of German women across a century of caesurae. I do not offer a guide-thread, as Schilinski is one of the Blessed Sisters who cut threads. I offer, instead, a companion darkness, the darkness that remains when you have looked too long at the sun.

Durée and Caesura: Two Temporalities of History

In the second volume of his Cinema books, Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between the image-mouvement and the image-temps: between cinema that organizes itself around action and cinema that organizes itself around time. The distinction is not merely formal, as the image-movement belongs to the sensory-motor schema: characters perceive, act, and the world responds. The image-time emerges when this schema breaks down, when characters find themselves in situations they can no longer act upon, when perception is decoupled from response, and when time itself becomes visible as a pure optical and sonic situation. Schilinski’s film belongs wholly and without remainder to the second category. There is no plot to follow because a plot is a structure of action, and this film has renounced action. What remains is temporality, but a temporality of a very specific kind.

Historical time consists of two dimensions. There are the durées, the continuities, the epochs, the long structures of social, political, and epistemic order that Foucault analyzed under the names of episteme, with its subjectivity, regime of truth, and order of power. A durée is not mere passage; it is a sustained architecture of subjectivity. It determines what can be said, what can be known, and what can be governed. It holds.

And then there are the moments when it no longer holds: the ruptures, the breaks, the points at which the life-force of a given order exhausts itself and the groundlessness of existence breaks through. These are the caesurae: not mere transitions between one epoch and another, but intervals of radical openness in which a collective encounters its own nothingness.

Here is the thesis I wish to propose, and I am aware of its audacity: the durée is the male description of historical time, and the caesura is the female experience of it. Men build durations. They erect regimes of truth and structures of power; they narrate history as continuity, development, progress, or decline—always as a line, always as a stream. Women, in the film’s implicit philosophy, inhabit the ruptures. They are present at the moments when one world ends, and another has not yet begun—at the births, the deaths, the wars’ starts and ends, the unnamed mornings before or after catastrophe. If the durée is the house, the caesura is the threshold; and it is on the threshold that Schilinski stations her camera.

The film presents four such thresholds, spanning roughly a century of German history: the eve of the First World War, circa 1913–14; the collapse of 1945; the twilight of the GDR in the late 1980s; and an indeterminate present that crystallizes around 2015, the year of the migration crisis, the year of Merkel’s fateful decision, a year that may yet prove to have set the coordinates for the century to come. These are not four stories. They are four wounds in the body of historical time, and the film moves between them not as narrative moves between episodes but as ritual moves between stations.

It is worth pausing on the philosophical genealogy of this move. The Foucauldian-Deleuzian tradition—the tradition of epistemic breaks, of the archéologie du savoir, and of the rhizome against the root—has always understood itself as a critique of phallogocentrism, of the patriarchal logos that narrates history as a single controllable coherent story. What it has rarely acknowledged is the gendered structure of its own central insight. If the break, the rupture, and the discontinuity are privileged over the continuity, then what is privileged is precisely what the female experience of history has always known: that the world ends and begins again, that between one epoch and the next there is a space of pure exposure in which everything is possible and nothing is guaranteed. Foucault and Deleuze wrote, in a sense, a female philosophy of history without knowing it, or perhaps while knowing it all too well, given Foucault’s own complex relationship to the masculine. Schilinski, for her part, does not theorize. She masterfully shows us what history looks like when it is seen from inside the caesura, by the women who live there.

This is not a metaphor. In each of the film’s four segments, we witness the precise moment at which a durée collapses: the agrarian-patriarchal order shattered by industrial war; the thousand-year Reich dissolving into river-water and refugee columns; the socialist state expiring in the silence of its own rituals; and, most enigmatically, the present order reaching some limit that the film does not name but makes visible in the image of a woman destroying a hearth with a hammer. The men in these stories are the bearers of the durée: peasants, officers, fathers, party members, the absent architects of structures that are always already failing. The women are the witnesses of the failure. They do not cause the caesura, they survive it. Which is to say, they inhabit it, they give it a body, and they transmit its knowledge to the next generation of women who will inhabit the next one.

Deleuze wrote that the time-image arises when we can no longer believe in the link between perception and action. Schilinski goes further. In her film, the time-image arises when we can no longer believe in the link between one epoch and the next, when the durée has been stripped away, and nothing remains but the pure interval, the wound between two worlds. It is in this wound that the women of her film live, and look, and remember.

The Female Gaze and the Phenomenology of the Wound

The film opens with a girl walking on crutches. For a moment, we believe she has lost a leg. Then we understand: she is imitating, performing, inhabiting the injury of the young man who lies in bed with an amputated limb, a leg severed not by war but by his own parents, who have mutilated their son to save him from the slaughterhouse of the First World War. The girl on crutches is not injured: she is practicing a radical empathy so complete that it bypasses understanding and becomes embodiment. She does not know what it is to lose a leg. She walks it. And in this walking, Schilinski delivers the first blow to the viewer’s settled perception: we have entered a world in which the gaze is not observation but participation, not distance but flesh.

The phenomenological tradition offers two models of the gaze, and Schilinski is in conversation with both. The first is Sartre’s. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes the primordial scene of looking through a keyhole: absorbed in what we see, we are pure intentionality, pure directedness toward the world. Then we hear footsteps behind us: someone is watching us watch. In that instant, the self snaps back into itself; we are no longer a gaze but a body, no longer a subject but an object of another’s perception. Shame floods in, and with that shame, morality manifests. For Sartre, this is the birth of the ethical subject: I become I at the moment I am caught looking and feeling shame.

Schilinski’s film is filled with peeping. The protagonist girl watches through cracks in doors and walls, she witnesses coupling, death, humiliation, and the breaking of her brother’s body. The visual grammar of the keyhole, the slit, and the gap recurs in every segment. But Schilinski departs from Sartre at the decisive point. In the world of the caesura, there is no one behind us. The moral order that would constitute us as ashamed subjects belongs to the durée, to the stable architecture of norms and gazes that holds during periods of continuity. In the rupture, that architecture has collapsed. The girl sees everything, and she is not ashamed. She is neither moral nor immoral. She is pre-moral: she exists in a temporality prior to the constitution of the ethical subject. Her gaze is the gaze of the caesura itself: open, unblinking, without judgment, because judgment requires a regime of truth, and the regime has ended.

The second phenomenological model is Merleau-Ponty’s, and it cuts deeper. In The Visible and the Invisible, the late, unfinished work, Merleau-Ponty dismantles the very distinction between seer and seen, between the gaze that constitutes and the world that is constituted. Vision, for Merleau-Ponty, is a form of flesh: we see because we are of the same stuff as what we see, because the visible folds back upon itself through our bodies. There is no pure subject facing a pure object; there is just a chiasm, an intertwining, a reversibility in which seeing is always also being-seen. Schilinski realizes this ontology cinematically: her camera does not observe the women, it participates in their looking. The solar flares that flood the frame, the tilted horizons, the moments when the image dissolves into pure light, these are not stylistic tics. They are the visible folding back upon itself, the chiasm made celluloid. The film shows everything and hides everything, as Merleau-Ponty’s ontology predicts: every disclosure is simultaneously a concealment, every revelation a veiling. This is why critics feel that the film “must be felt, not understood.” They are registering the Merleau-Pontian structure of a visibility that is constitutively opaque.

But the film’s most radical philosophical gesture is neither Sartrean, nor Merleau-Pontian. It is the reimagining of trauma, and with it, the reimagining of the wound.

Standard trauma theory, from its psychoanalytic origins onward, conceives of trauma as an experience that did not take place: an event so overwhelming that the human subject could not integrate it, a rupture in individuation that leaves part of the self unlived, frozen, and inaccessible. Trauma is, on this account, a failure—a failure of the psychic apparatus to metabolize what happened. And this is, I submit, a profoundly male conception. It presupposes a subject who should have been able to withstand the event, who should have maintained the integrity of his selfhood through the catastrophe. The wound, in this framework, is a defect, something to be healed, overcome, and worked through.

Schilinski proposes something else entirely. In her film, trauma is not a failed experience but the texture of experience itself. The protagonist, a teenage girl who counts the cuts on the soles of her feet after running through the stubble field, is not displaying a symptom: she is taking inventory. Each wound is a caesura in miniature, a break in the skin that is also an opening, a mouth, a site of passage. Contemporary surrealist iconography, which Schilinski surely knows, frequently equates the wound with the vulva: both are openings in the surface of the body, both bleed, both are sites of vulnerability and generation. The wounds on the teenage girl’s feet are not injuries to be healed; they are marks of initiation, the evidence that the body has passed through the caesura and emerged on the other side, scarred but alive. And the game of counting them—“who has more?”—with a teenage boy is not morbid. It is the child’s version of the ancient practice of reading one’s own body as a text of survival.

This is the female gaze at its most philosophically potent: a gaze that does not flinch from the wound because it does not regard the wound as a catastrophe. For the women of this film, the wound is what the world is. Between birth and death, which are themselves the first and last traumas, existence is a series of openings, breakings, bleedings, and closings. This is not pessimism, it is a realism so thorough that it encompasses death within life, and life within death, without needing to resolve the contradiction. The men in the film experience the caesura as catastrophe: as loss of limb, loss of war, loss of state, or loss of meaning. The women experience it as the medium in which they have always lived. They know the wound from the inside. They were born through one.

A Metaphysics of Dwelling

Where does this history take place? The question is not as simple as it sounds. A conventional historical film locates itself in a period: in costumes, furniture, technologies of communication, the texture of everyday objects that signal “this is 1914” or “this is 1988.” Schilinski provides these signals, but they are secondary. The primary locus of her film is not a period but a locus: the farm, the single East German farm that persists across all four segments, that outlasts every regime and every war, and that dies only at the end. Not by bombardment or decree but by the hand of a woman with a hammer, smashing the hearth of the farmhouse.

The genealogy of the film’s women cannot be traced through blood and flesh. I tried, and failed, to construct a family tree of the characters in any conventional sense. The names blur; the faces recur across generations in ways that may be genetic or may be spectral; the living and the dead share the screen without announcement. Schilinski does not build genealogies of kinship, but a genealogy of dwelling. The question is not “who gave birth to whom?” but “who lived in this house? who died here? who was born here?” The farm is the genealogical locus: not a metaphor for it, but the space of birth, the material structure through which generations pass as water passes through a riverbed, shaping it and being shaped by it.

This is a metaphysics of dwelling, but it is not Heidegger’s. When Heidegger, in his 1951 lecture Bauen Wohnen Denken, meditates on the essence of building and inhabiting, he arrives at a vision of dwelling as the fundamental relation of mortal beings to the earth, the sky, the divinities, and their fellow mortals—the “Geviert,” the fourfold. The house, for Heidegger, is a gathering: it gathers the world into a place, it makes the earth habitable, it shelters the mortal in the proximity of the divine. But Heidegger’s dwelling is a male construction. It is built, maintained, passed from father to son, and anchored in the stability of the durée. Schilinski’s farm is something (somewhere?) else. It is not built but endured, it is not heritage but the limbo of inheritors. It is not a shelter from death but a site where death is permanently at home: where the dead cohabit with the living, where birth and burial occur under the same roof, where the hearth warms the bodies of infants and corpses with equal indifference.

If the farm is a sacred site, its sacrality is pre-temple, pre-architectural. In our conversation about the movie, my colleague philosopher Sergey Grigorishin proposed the image of a German Stonehenge, and the analogy is precise. The great Neolithic solar monuments were neither houses nor temples. They were open thresholds, places where the earth met the sky and the human met the cosmic, without walls, without a roof, without the enclosure that later religion would require. The farm in Schilinski’s film functions in the same way: it is a threshold between worlds. The women pass through it as initiates pass through a sacred precinct, entering as daughters, emerging as mothers, and re-entering as ghosts. The men pass through it too, but differently: they arrive as laborers, lovers, and they leave. Everything’s in motion; meanwhile, the farm remains. It is the women’s space not because they own it but because they are it, in the same way that the riverbed is the river’s history.

And then the hearth is destroyed. In the final segment, which I will argue is not necessarily a fourth story but the eschatological finale to the preceding three, a woman takes a sledgehammer to the great tiled stove that has stood at the center of the farmhouse for a century. She strikes, rests, wipes her brow, strikes again. It is manual labor, and it is ritual murder. For the hearth is the origin of the house in every metaphysical tradition that has reflected on the matter: Hestia in the Greek world, the lar familiaris in the Roman tradition, the sacred fire that makes a dwelling a dwelling and not merely a structure. To destroy the hearth is to kill the house. It is to close the genealogy, to seal the threshold, and to declare that this particular site of passage between worlds has exhausted its function. Central heating will come, or electric radiators; a developer will convert the farmhouse into a loft apartment in which no one will feel at home. The farm’s history is thus over.

But the woman who annihilates the hearth is not an agent of destruction in any nihilistic sense. She is performing the final act of the rite. Every sacred cycle has its closure: the fire that has burned for generations must be extinguished so that a new fire may be kindled elsewhere. The destruction of the hearth is itself a caesura, perhaps the most intimate one. The one that occurs not on the battlefield or at the river-crossing but in the kitchen, in the place where bread was baked, and the dead were washed. It is the caesura that happens when a woman decides that a certain form of life has been lived to its end. And in that decision — quiet, exhausting, domestic, absolute — there is more historical force than in any treaty or revolution. The durée of the farm, which survived two world wars and two German states, is ended not by history’s grand actors but by a woman with a hammer. This, too, is what history looks like from inside the caesura.

The Suppression of Death

There is a genre of photography that contemporary world has forgotten. From the 1890s through the early 1920s, across Europe and the Americas, it was customary for families to bring their dead to the photographic studio, or to summon the photographer to the home, and to sit for a portrait with the deceased. The family would arrange itself around the body: parents flanking a dead child, children standing behind a dead grandmother, the living composed in their Sunday clothes, the dead composed in the stillness that is no longer sleep. These photographs survive in archives and antique shops, and they are unbearable to the modern eye. Not because they are gruesome as the dead in them look peaceful, often beautiful, but because they violate a taboo so deep that we do not even recognize it as a taboo. We have forgotten that the dead were once part of the family portrait.

I encountered these photographs in force at the C/O Berlin “The Last Pivture” exhibition in 2018, a sprawling meditation on photography and death that included, alongside the historical images, the work of a contemporary photographer who volunteered in a hospice and made paired portraits of patients: one taken a day before death, one a day after. The corridor of those diptychs—life, then not-life, the difference almost invisible—led into the historical gallery, where the nineteenth-century families stood with their ancestors, and the effect was of entering a civilization that had not yet learned to be afraid of what we are most afraid of. I walked through that exhibition with the late Kyiv photographer Viktor Marushchenko, and I walked through it again, in memory, while watching Schilinski’s film.

For Schilinski returns the dead to the family portrait. Her film is full of corpses, of the dying, of figures who may be alive or may be ghosts: the interchangeable sisters of the first segment, the women who enter the river in the second and may or may not emerge. The boundaries between the living and the dead are permeable in every frame. But the point is not morbidity. The point is that Schilinski is restoring a relation that modernity has severed: the relation between the family and its dead, between the community of the living and the community of ancestors. In the sacred time of the ritual—that solar ritual that the film’s title—the living, the dead, and the unborn coexist. They share the frame. The family photograph with the deceased was not a memento mori; it was a technology of communion, a portal through which the family entered the presence of those who had crossed to the other side. The white faces of the dead on the old black-and-white prints functioned as black (or super-white?) holes in the image, points of passage through which the living could communicate with the departed. When this genre disappeared, something more than an aesthetic convention was lost. A metaphysical capacity was amputated.

Why did it disappear? The proximate cause is saturation: after the mass death of the First World War, after the trenches and the influenza and the long civil wars of Eastern Europe, families had had enough of death to last several lifetimes. They no longer wished to stage it in the parlor. But the deeper cause is structural, and it concerns the metaphysics of capital.

Capitalism, at its core, is a machine for producing the future. Let me explain: capital must grow; growth requires investment; investment is, by definition, the colonization of the time that has not yet arrived. In its early industrial phase, capital colonized the immediate future like the next harvest, the next production cycle, or the next quarter’s to do list. By the second half of the twentieth century, when the present had been saturated and growth within it and within the near future had become impossible, capital turned to the distant future: university study credit, mortgage debt, sovereign bonds with thirty-year maturities. Dahrendorf’s concept of “creative destruction” captures one dimension of this process: the perpetual annihilation and reconstruction of economic structures. But it misses the temporal one. What consumer capitalism destroys is not only industries and institutions but futurity itself. It devours the future through the mechanism of long-term tripling debt, transforming the not-yet-lived into a resource to be extracted in the present.

But this extraction has a precondition. You can only cannibalize the future if you have ceased to fear the end. And you can only cease to fear the end if you have forgotten death. The suppression of death in contemporary culture is not squeamishness, it is a structural requirement of late capitalism. A human subject who remembers that s/he will die is a subject who resists the indefinite extension of debt, who questions the premise of perpetual growth, and who suspects that the future is not an infinite resource but a finite gift. Such a subject is dysfunctional from the standpoint of the consumerist order. S/he must be re-educated, or, more precisely, s/he must be made to forget.

Schilinski’s film is an act of counter-forgetting. It insists, with the stubbornness of ritual, on the presence of death at the center of life. It photographs the dead alongside the living. It shows us children who play among corpses, women who speak to their ancestors, a community in which the departed have not departed but merely changed their mode of attendance. And in doing so, it commits what is, from the standpoint of consumer capitalism, the most dangerous possible act of subversion: it reminds us that we will die, that our children will die, that the future is not a commodity to be leveraged but a darkness to be entered.

The film was praised at the Cannes Festival but was not nominated for the Oscar. It has become a cultural phenomenon but not good for visual consumption. And it is clear why: a culture built on the forgetting of death cannot celebrate a film that remembers. To remember death in the age of capital is to commit an offence against the order of production, an offence for which the punishment is not persecution but something worse—irrelevance. Schilinski’s film asks to be forgotten by the very world it indicts. That it refuses to be forgotten, that it persists, that it scratches the skin, and that it demands four viewings, is its final act of resistance.

The End of All Stories

I have spoken of four segments in the film’s narration, but I am no longer certain that four is the correct number. The first three are historical in the strict sense: they are anchored in recognizable periods, furnished with the material culture of their decades, populated by characters whose actions and sufferings can be located on the timeline of German history. The fourth segment is different and resists dating. We see a woman demolishing the hearth; we see a girl absorbed in her smartphone; we see the farmhouse in a state of renovation, stripped of the patina that made it a home. Is this 2015? 2020? 2025? Schilinski withholds the coordinates, and in withholding them she performs a temporal operation more radical than anything in the preceding segments: she lifts us out of historical time altogether.

I think this segment presents an eternal Now of a human being, not in the Heideggerian sense of being-toward-death, but in something closer to an absolute present, a being-Here-and-Now that has no horizon and no elsewhere. Or more precise, what Schilinski constructs in the final segment, is not an eternal present but the temporality of the caesura itself. If the first three segments showed us caesurae from within, that is, the moments of rupture experienced by women who still belonged to a collapsing durée, the fourth segment shows us what remains when all durées have collapsed, when the rupture is no longer an event within history but the permanent condition of existence. This is not timelessness, it is the time after the wound has opened and before it has closed, the interval that has become the world.

Heidegger’s existential analytic gives us Sein-zum-Tode, being-toward-death, as the fundamental structure of authentic temporality: we exist as human beings who project themselves upon their own finitude, and it is this projection that gives time its urgency and its meaning. But the women Dasein of Schilinski’s film do not project themselves toward death. They have already passed through it: not personally, not literally, but collectively, through the accumulated caesurae of a century. What Schilinski presents is something for which Heidegger has no adequate category: something like a Sein-im-Tode, a being-in-death, a mode of existence that has absorbed mortality into itself and come out the other side. This is closer to Bataille’s inner experience: the methodical transgression of the limits of the self, the exit into nothingness and the return with the knowledge that nothingness is not the negation of being but its ground. Bataille’s human subject who has undergone the inner experience does not fear death because s/he has already been there, in Nothingness, and witnessed Being-as-it-is from outside. S/he has looked at the sun.

Two images from the final segment crystallize this. The first is the Daughter on her smartphone: absorbed in the screen, oblivious to the ghosts that populate the house, and disconnected from the sacred time that the previous three segments have inhabited. She is the figure of the present as amnesia, the consumerist human subject who has successfully forgotten death and now lives in the smooth, frictionless temporality of the scroll. She cannot see the ancestors. She does not know that she is standing in a threshold between worlds. Because for her, there is only one world: the flat, luminous, endlessly refreshable surface of the gadget. Schilinski does not judge her. She simply places her in the frame alongside what she cannot see, and lets the juxtaposition speak.

The second image is the (Kali?) Mother with the hammer. She knows exactly what she is doing: she is not renovating; she is performing an execution. Each blow to the ceramic tiles of the stove is a blow to the metaphysical core of the house: to Hestia, the lar, and the Ancestral Fire. And yet, as I said before, her gesture is not nihilistic. It has the quality of a rite performed with full knowledge of its consequences and its necessity. The hearth must be destroyed because the cycle it sustained has reached its end. A new cycle will require a new fire, kindled in a place we cannot yet see. The apocalypse, that is, revelation, is not the destruction of the world but the disclosure of its hidden structure. What the final segment reveals is precisely what the three preceding segments have enacted: that history is not continuity but a series of openings and closings, that every hearth is temporary, and that the women who tend the fire are also the priestesses who extinguish it.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind (thanks to Sergey Grigorishin’s association). Indeed, in Kubrick’s final sequence, the astronaut Bowman passes through the star gate into a space that resembles a Louis XVI hotel room, where he ages, dies, and is reborn as the Star Child. The everyday becomes extraterrestrial; the familiar becomes absolutely strange. Schilinski achieves a comparable estrangement without leaving the farmhouse. Her final segment shows us our own world with gadgets, renovation loft-projects, and the banal textures of twenty-first-century domesticity, as though it were the surface of an alien planet. The technique is not science fiction but ostranenie, the Formalist defamiliarization, applied not to language but to historical time itself. We are invited to see the present as the ancients saw an eclipse: as a rupture in the natural order, a moment when the sun goes dark and the hidden architecture of the cosmos becomes momentarily visible.

The Rite That Prolongs Life

Every rite has its counter-rite. In Russian literature of the 1990s, Vladimir Sorokin performed one of the most audacious ritual acts in modern fiction: Blue Lard, a novel that functions as a shamanic funeral for the Soviet human. The book’s central image is a supernatural narcotic, distilled from the cloned flesh of the great Soviet writers, which Stalin injects into his own brain, producing a black hole that devours Soviet civilization in its entirety, with its language, its history, its dreams, its achievements, and its crimes. Sorokin’s novel is a kamlaniye, a shamanic séance of termination. It is profoundly, aggressively male: a decision to end, to sever, to declare a history complete and consign it to the void. The shaman Sorokin cuts the Soviet life’s thread and walks away.

Schilinski’s film is the counter-rite. Where Sorokin buries, Schilinski delivers. Where his ritual closes a history, hers opens the space from which the next one will emerge. Her film does not end: not in any conventional narrative sense, and not in the deeper sense that the cycle it describes has no final term. The hearth is destroyed, yes. The farm is finished, no doubt. But the women are not finished: they will move to another place, build another fire, bear other children, and survive other catastrophes. The caesurae will continue to come, as they have always come, and the women will continue to inhabit them, as they have always inhabited them, not as victims of rupture but as its midwives. The durée will be rebuilt by men with blueprints and constitutions, and it will exhaust itself again, and again the ground will open, and again the women will be there, in the wound, doing what the wound requires: mourning, counting, remembering, and giving birth.

This is the structure that underlies the film’s deepest mythological layer: the Moirai, the three Benevolent Sisters who spin, measure, and cut the thread of fate. In Greek tradition, the Fates are not cruel, but they can be tired. When you have spun so many threads, when you have measured so many lives, the cutting is no longer an act of malice or mercy but a technical operation, performed with the indifference of professional. Schilinski’s women are participants in this ancient labor: they are weavers and cutters, spinners and severers. The exchange of glances between the two sisters in the first segment—the younger on the ground, the older on the hay cart, a moment before she falls to her death—is the gaze of one Moira recognizing another. The older sister does not fall, she releases, she cuts her own thread. And in cutting it, she demonstrates what the film as a whole enacts: that the power to end is also the power to begin, that every severance is a birth, that the sisters who preside over death preside equally over life.

Hugo, at the opening of Notre-Dame de Paris, pauses before a word scratched into the stone of the cathedral: ANANKE, that is, Necessity, Fate, the iron law that governs all things. Hugo’s Ananke is terrible, inhuman, and absolute. But Ananke, actually, has two faces: the Greek tradition knows both Ananke and Tyche, tragic necessity and good fortune, the dark sister and the bright. In the Roman world, Fortuna, the bright face, was a goddess, female, capricious, generous. The dark face had Fatum, that male, implacable, and final god. Schilinski’s film moves in the space before this Destiny’s bifurcation, before it divides into good and evil, male and female, fortune and doom. Her women inhabit the undivided ground of necessity itself, the ground on which threads are spun without reference to their quality, measured without reference to their worth, and cut without reference to the weeper’s grief. This is not fatalism but something older and stranger: an intimacy with the process of fate that precedes all moral evaluation of its outcomes.

And so the film, despite everything it shows us—the amputations, the drownings, the rapes, the degradations, the mud and the blood and the dirty feet of girl who have run through stubble—is not a pessimistic work. It is not even a tragic one, if by tragedy we mean the spectacle of a noble subject destroyed by forces beyond his control. Schilinski’s women are not destroyed, they are continuous, not as individuals, for individuals die, but as a lineage, a practice, a way of being in the wound that is transmitted from grandmother to mother to daughter across the caesurae that shatter everything else. The farm is destroyed, but the women who lived in it carry its fire in their bodies. The hearth can and will be rebuilt. Life, as the film insists with every frame, is not a possession that can be lost but a process that cannot be stopped, a process that includes death, encompasses trauma, absorbs catastrophe, and continues.

This is the female metaphysics that Schilinski’s film has made visible, and for which we do not yet have a proper philosophical vocabulary. The conceptual resources I have drawn on in this essay, including Deleuze’s image-time, Foucault’s epistemic breaks, Sartre’s gaze, Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, Heidegger’s dwelling, and Bataille’s inner experience, are all, in their different ways, approximations. They circle the film without entering it, as I circled it through three failed viewings before the fourth attempt carried me inside. The philosophy adequate to In die Sonne schauen has not yet been written. It would be a philosophy of the caesura as a mode of habitation rather than a catastrophe to be overcome; a philosophy of the wound as an organ of perception rather than a failure of integration; a philosophy of historical time as experienced by those who do not build the durée but survive its collapse. Such a philosophy would be, in the deepest sense, a female philosophy. Not because only women could write it, but because only the female experience of history, as Schilinski has rendered it, provides the phenomenological ground on which it could be built.

I began by saying that the film scratched me. I end by saying that the scratches have not healed, and that I do not wish them to. They are the marks left by a gaze that saw through me to something I had not known was there. Something older than my ideas, older than my theories, and older than the philosophical tradition in which I was trained. Schilinski looked at the sun and did not go blind. She came back with a film. The rest of us are still learning to see what she saw without a blink.

Note:

1. This essay emerged from a discussion with my colleague, the philosopher Sergey Grigorishin, on his program at the Telegram “PhilosophyOfCinema” and YouTube “Sergey Grigorishin” channels. Our discussion of Schilinsky’s film (in Russian) can be viewed at “Глядя на солнце”.