As she visits an exhibition, a graphic designer is mesmerised by the photocollages of the anti-fascist John Heartfield, who became known as the “montage dada.” Stefanie falls through a vortex of paper and photo snippets into an old-fashioned looking studio. A pair of scissors – an analogue tool she herself hardly uses – attracts her attention. She begins to cut a figure out of cardboard, a miniature version of the artist who at once addresses her and explores his life and works with her. The studio turns out to be a living archive that ceaselessly produces documents and information about Johnny. The research gives Stefanie, stressed and disappointed by her job, new motivation, and the courage to choose a different path as a designer.

Both protagonists have the same profession and find themselves facing the same questions about the significance and recognition of their work. Both are struggling in their own way with frustration and fears, caused by the different social and political circumstances of their generations. The different elements of this animated documentary come together in a dialogic collage that reflects on the mission of art, its educative and critical power, and its potential to bring about changes in our society.

“Apparently, it had to happen to me before I learned it was ‘normal’.” This statement by a protagonist sums up how our society deals with stillborn children or children who die young: Star children are omnipresent (one in four mothers has lost a child) and yet absent. We lack the vocabulary, the sensitivity, and the tranquillity to enable parents to mourn.
Remo Rauscher’s animated documentary confronts us with this inability, letting twenty people in mourning or who deal with mourning speak: Thinking out loud, struggling for words, regarding the pain from different perspectives, discovering dignity and strength in it and helping us to overcome the taboo. They object to being an “error in the system”, to accepting the speechlessness. In Rauscher’s film, the darkness is ambivalent and palpable on all levels: It is absorbing and caring. It is generous and gives us moments of beauty, humility, and hope. The 2D animations in muted colours on a dark background are always abstract, sketchy, and restrained – an expression of tact and respect. They draw attention to themselves only once in a while, while the voices are given a lot of space and can unfold without fear. This film opens a space to mourn that society is unable to offer yet.

“I don’t want to say it out loud, but my flat’s lower down,” the narrator remarks. The camera at first follows her legs climbing up the stairs of the hallway. That is all we see of her. Very soon, her gaze determines our perspective in this unsettling story. At first it all sounds like a mistake, but at some point, the tenant gets used to the fact that in some inexplicable way and completely unceremoniously she is pulled down from the fourth floor to the coal cellar, floor by floor. A decline that the neighbourhood lets happen in deafening silence.

The “falling” protagonist’s irritated soliloquy, sometimes resigned, often full of calculated optimism, is accompanied by charcoal drawings. Their clarity and architectural detail – down to the curlicued decorations of the upper-class mansion – gradually fade over the course of events. The spatial representation becomes more and more vague and is reduced to a few strokes, only to dissolve into soft areas of charcoal dust in the end. In this nightmarish story, reality no longer offers any support, only one’s own ego. Susi Jirkuff has adapted Ilse Aichinger’s eponymous, multilayered story, which was first published in the mid-1950s, with a remarkable urgency that demonstrates the topicality of Aichinger’s text and writing.