The image and sound are each about a thing that happened this week.
The first thing was watching a movie by Roy Anderson, “Songs from the Second Floor”. In the movie, an unnamed town loses something, something essential, and they are trying hopelessly to recover it. The town is paralyzed by a traffic jam. Its inhabitants cannot communicate with each other. They are endlessly sitting naked in beds, unattractively, waiting for or listening to or ignoring their partners. Each scene is a moving tableau – static, still, it each tells one story, it is beautiful, it ends. The only constant is the traffic jam.
But it is clear that each picture is only such one sentence, not much more, not adding up. And this picture speaks of the town’s attempt to sacrifice a child to end the traffic jam. As she falls, in the movie, there is no sound.
The moment was grave, the silence was so still. But the movie was funny, I swear. In a weird way, messed up, but funny nonetheless. Everyone had white painted faces, they were acting their parts, they were masks. What had happened could not be real, and it could not have been that grave. It had not been a real girl.
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