where night falls a thud

Halfway through Sophie Watzlawick's latest short film, one catches a brief glimpse of a bloom of Aurelia Aurita, also known as „the common jellyfish” or „moon jellies” – not at all by happenstance, within a film that so tenderly weaves its delicate broderie of images around the concepts of sight and nature.   

Jellyfish are much more than just a serene, ethereal sight to behold, but indeed also fascinating creatures when one considers the way they perceive the world: instead of eyes, ears, and a cerebellum, the Aurelia Aurita has several bell-shaped, synaesthetic structures named "rhopalia" around its brims, which guide its sense of motion and space and allow it to perceive light and shadows. All of which is both the constitutive matter of cinema – and an invitation to consider a wholly different perceptive, sensorial approach to what surrounds us, particularly in an age that obfuscates traditional understandings of visibility, uprooting our capacity to articulate events in the form of traditional imagery or within typical patterns of thought and text. (At one point, the sound of an adjusting speaker input is heard, as if attempting to plug and unplug a given mode of insight.)   

Reconfirming these tectonic shifts, where night falls a thud explores the minutiae of natural textures, beings, and phenomena, an idling gaze steeped in equal amounts of grief, anxiety, and serenity, at times trembling as if in a state of existential tremor; all the while drawing a fine parallel between the materiality of nature and that of film, conjuring a sense of gravity in the face of ecological anguish and digital angst, underpinned by fleeting, stark poetic thoughts that encapsulate its sense of dread towards a world that is heading down a deeply unpredictable path. (Flavia Dima)