Rising Fall

Rising Fall is a three-part study on nature as its spectacle, on what Spinoza termed natura naturans, or “nature naturing.” Something happens without the need of a guiding agent. Filmic images are content to quietly watch and listen and wait. And they expect the same of how they are observed. In other words an immanence of nature confiding a secret. This involves movements that are visible, and more importantly audible, though they are not conspicuous in an ordered existence. Possible reasons are that they are too insignificant and evidence too little form, an insufficient amount of purpose. However, alternations, even metamorphoses take place, and they tell their own stories, of those occasional events that do not include humankind, which are fully independent of it.

The sole order that Lukas Marxt follows is a weather forecast for a certain place and the selection of a camera angle at this place. Everything else “happens,” as part of the flow of things, the atmospheres, without any kind of orientation. Observation began in processes contingent to seeing and hearing, perception in solitude, in other words in immediate co-existence. An extremely varied and complex world of sounds fills the picture and the space surrounding us: roaring, obstructions in the wind, pelting drops of rain, animal sounds. This aural level turns out to be the images’ center, their aesthetic immanence. The visible world is overlaid by its acoustic form. When a skater mounts the platform in the final sequence, his sole task seems to be curving and disappearing into the depths, and most importantly adding another sound to the space. While the individual is mute, life is not.

(Marc Ries)