YahneYahne Or the drowned child

A female voice-over interrupts the sounds of nature lacing through Antoinette Zwirchmayr's film just twice, namely at the beginning and the end. As the title JaneJane fades in, spoken words herald the tragic narrative of "the drowned child" which follows, dialectically constituted by a sequence of fragmented cinematic snapshots.  

The first part of the film is dominated by an idea of duality in the form of a symbiotic relationship as introduced by the title of the film. Jane and Jane are two young women dressed in white. Together they pick quinces from a tree, lie in the grass, and wash the fruit in a river. But suddenly the idyllic orchard scene of their togetherness shatters – the body of one of the women motionlessly floats on the surface of the water. Zwirchmayr's camera particularly focuses in on details, capturing gnarled deformities of the fruit, the glitter of the sun on the river, a white garment slowly sinking down into its depths.

The facial close-up of a further protagonist introduces the second part of the film, shifting the motif of duality into a series of dialectical relationships: daughter/mother, summer/winter, nature/architecture, white/black. A middle-aged woman dressed in black walks through exterior spaces of a snow-covered building. This site becomes the location of an encounter with the film's previous protagonists. The voice-over now quotes Dea Loher's play – to which Zwirchmayr's title also refers – speaking to the presence of the three women, JaneJane's death and Jane's survival. The painful severing of their symbiosis is not only seen as a collision of past and present, but also as a loss of language or voice – “silence” is the final word as the film concludes. (Bettina Brunner)

Translation: Eve Heller