ECHOES OF THE PAST

ECHOES OF THE PAST

The Ontology of Repetition

A film by Mascha Schilinski

By Anthony Xiradakis

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." - Karl Marx

Time is not a line. This truth, long established by contemporary physics, cinema still struggles to translate into images. Mascha Schilinski takes up this challenge in her second feature film with an ambition bordering on excess. Four young girls in four different eras—Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka—go through adolescence on the same farm in northern Germany. This narrative device, apparently simple, conceals a vertiginous metaphysical inquiry: what does it mean to inhabit a place when that place preserves the memory of all those who occupied it before us?

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Alma grows up in a family of landowners shortly before World War I. The seven-year-old girl discovers she bears the name of her deceased sister, a revelation that leads her to become preoccupied with her own mortality. This foundational scene establishes the film's paradigm: identity is never original, it is always a citation of an anterior identity, repetition of a name already worn, involuntary reincarnation of an extinguished existence. The subject is not constituted in the modern autonomy of the Cartesian cogito, but in radical dependence on the dead who precede and name them.

The writing adopts a radical fragmentation that deliberately disorients the viewer. Scenes appear in a completely shattered, fragmented mode like shards of memory, like the Devil's mirror at the beginning of Andersen's The Snow Queen. This literary comparison is not fortuitous. In Andersen's tale, the fragments of the demonic mirror scattered across the world distort the perception of those they touch. Here, the temporal fragments dispersed throughout the narrative reveal a truth that linear chronology would conceal: history does not progress, it repeats itself with minor variations that change nothing essential.

Mascha Schilinski constructs her film on the principle of repetition, which stands in frontal opposition to the Western conception of historical progress. Each generation of young girls believes they're living a singular, unique existence, irreducible to the one that preceded it. Yet their lives seem to answer each other despite the years separating them. This answer is not a dialogue but an echo (a crucial term that gives the film its French title). The echo brings no new information, it merely sends back, weakened and distorted, the initial sound. The four destinies don't communicate with each other, they reflect each other in a deadly symmetry.

The House as Corporeal Archive

The farm transforms over the century, but echoes of the past resonate within its walls. Architecture is not a passive backdrop. It functions as a somatic archive that preserves the trace of the bodies that inhabited it. This conception refers to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theories on embodied memory, but also to Walter Benjamin's reflections on the aura of objects and places. The house doesn't merely record events, it absorbs the affects, traumas, and unfulfilled desires of those who passed through it. This is how we can express, in everyday language, that a house has a soul.

The work on the quality of lighting and sets serves as an anchor point for the viewer: the warmer browns of the early 20th century, the oranges of the seventies, the more diversified polychromy of today. This chromatic variation materializes the passage of time while emphasizing that this passage doesn't free the characters from repetition. On the contrary, the diversification of colors masks the permanence of structures. The world seems to change, open up, modernize. But the young girls continue to die in the same circumstances, victims of the same violence, prisoners of the same destiny.

Mascha Schilinski's approach might distantly evoke that of Edgar Reitz's monumental Heimat, in its way of covering several generations attached to the same place. But while dreams of elsewhere opened the horizon in Reitz, the only escape offered in this isolated farm is limited to death. This comparison reveals by contrast the film's philosophical radicality. Heimat still belonged to a humanist teleology where history, despite its tragedies, opened possibilities for emancipation. Echoes of the Past breaks with this optimism. Death is not an accident but a structure. It defines the insurmountable horizon of feminine existence in this closed space.

The Feminine as Ontological Condition

Effect of tightening regarding central characters: varied and multiple in Reitz, embodied by women, between childhood and adolescence, in Schilinski. This choice is not circumstantial. It poses a fundamental philosophical question about sexual difference as ontological difference. Why women? Because in the patriarchal German structure traversing the century, the feminine occupies a particular position: that of being-for-reproduction, of existence reduced to its biological and symbolic function.

The four young girls don't choose their destiny. They endure it. This radical absence of freedom poses the question of agency (this capacity to act on the world that modern philosophy placed at the heart of subjectivity). Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka are not autonomous subjects in the Kantian sense. They are beings determined by their inscription in a lineage, in a place, in a family structure that precedes and absolutely surpasses them.

By constantly mixing eras, names, and traumas, the viewer risks exhaustion and getting lost in the often nebulous labyrinth of the director's thought. This criticism points to a real difficulty, but it can also be read positively. The viewer's exhaustion mimics the characters' exhaustion. Getting lost in the narrative labyrinth reproduces the existential experience of young girls who don't understand the forces that determine them. Formal complexity is not aesthetic gratuitousness, it is philosophical necessity.

Temporality as Prison

The fragmented editing destroys chronological linearity. Schilinski moves seamlessly between eras: a sequence showing Angelika's imagined suicide in the 1980s suddenly echoes Erika's death fantasy in the 1940s. These visual echoes (repeated movements, shared wounds, innocent gazes) suggest a tragic destiny, as if pain had been inscribed in this land's DNA. The genetic metaphor is not insignificant. It points toward a biological determination that traverses generations, a heredity of misfortune that isn't transmitted through education but through the very inscription in filiation.

The Male Gaze as Invisible Structure

Suspicious deaths that the elders assimilated to work accidents, as if the ghosts of the past could no longer withdraw from the walls they inhabit. This formulation reveals the film's main angle of attack: patriarchal violence doesn't necessarily manifest through explicit aggressions, but through systematic negligence, a refusal to see, a banalization of murder as accident. The young girls die, and nobody asks questions. Their disappearance is integrated into the normal course of things.

Fabian Gömper's camera, often in 1:1.37 format, acts as a voyeuristic lens, looking through door cracks, behind windows, in the dark corners of the house. These tunnel shots don't merely create a claustrophobic atmosphere, they mime the childlike perspective of the characters and reveal the very structure of the male gaze that observes them without showing itself. The viewer themselves is placed in the voyeur's position, forced to recognize their complicity in the scopic device that objectifies feminine bodies.

Schilinski radicalizes the critique: she doesn't content herself with denouncing the male gaze, she makes it the invisible structure that organizes space itself. The house is architecture of the patriarchal gaze. Its windows, doors, corridors create blind spots where violence can be perpetrated without witness, or rather with only walls as witnesses that never speak.

The Impossibility of Narration

The director and Louise Peter liberate the screenplay from the constraints of conventional narrative. Instead of explaining, they make us feel: the smell of straw in the barn, the whispers of sterilized servants, the heart beating during a first physical intimacy. This refusal of narrative explanation is not obscurantism. It recognizes the impossibility of putting into coherent narrative an experience that escapes rational language.

Dialogue is minimal. "You always see things from the outside, but you never see yourself" (a phrase that encapsulates the imprisonment of all characters). This line touches the heart of the philosophical problem: self-consciousness requires a reflexive gaze that presupposes a distance from oneself. But the young girls are prisoners of an immediacy that forbids them this distance. They live their oppression without being able to think it, because thinking requires a step back that their very condition renders impossible.

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The Impossible Recognition

The film is presented in official competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and wins the Jury Prize, ex aequo with Óliver Laxe's Sirāt. This institutional recognition raises questions. How can a work so radically pessimistic, refusing all narrative consolation, be celebrated by the cinematic institution? Either the jury grasped the subversive dimension of the film and accepted its apparent nihilism, or (more cynical hypothesis) the sophisticated aesthetic form allows for domesticating a subject that should be unbearable.

The film's plastic beauty perhaps constitutes its most troubling paradox. The breathtaking visuals and extraordinary performances make the film dark, poetic, and deeply moving. But can we aestheticize violence without betraying it? Doesn't elegant staging risk transforming suffering into spectacle? These questions traverse the entire history of engaged art, from Brecht to Godard.

The director seems conscious of this tension. Her film offers no aesthetic redemption. The images are beautiful, but this beauty soothes nothing. On the contrary, it deepens the feeling of injustice.

Echoes of the Past asserts itself as a necessary and unbearable work. Necessary because it thinks without compromise about the feminine condition as an existential condition of oppression. Unbearable because it refuses all consoling escape routes. The film proposes no hope, no opening toward a different future. It simply exposes, with implacable rigor, the repetitive structure of a violence that traverses generations without weakening.

This absence of horizon perhaps constitutes the film's limit. By refusing all possibility of emancipation, by presenting oppression as an insurmountable structure, the filmmaker risks producing a paralyzing effect. If nothing can change, why struggle? This question haunts the film as it haunts all radically pessimistic philosophy. But perhaps we must understand this pessimism not as resignation but as prerequisite lucidity. Before transforming anything, we must accept to look violence in the face, without taking refuge in the fables of progress that mask eternal repetition.

"The eternal return is not the return of the same, but the same that returns different." - Gilles Deleuze