Perhaps You’re Not Yourself, But Her

German director Mascha Schilinski’s visually evocative 2025 film suggests the influence of Francesca Woodman’s photographic work.

By Marya E. GatesMarch 7, 2026

• Film

“I WAS (AM?) not unique but special. This is why I was an artist […] I was inventing a language for people to see the everyday things that I also see.”

Artist Francesca Woodman wrote those haunting words in her diary shortly before her death by suicide on January 19, 1981, a few months shy of her 23rd birthday. The daughter of an abstract painter and a ceramicist, Woodman had art in her blood. Some have called her a prodigy; others see her nine-year body of work as the first movement of an artist who never got the chance to mature along with her art. Wherever the truth lies, Woodman’s early death, and the hundreds of esoteric photographs that she left behind, have rendered her forever trapped in the amber of youth. These images, many of them self-portraits of her nude body—by turns exposed, blurred, or partly obscured—evoke the traumas that may take root in those formative years, and which may be otherwise difficult to express.

I thought of her work immediately as I watched Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling (2025), a nonlinear tone poem of a film that follows four generations of women, connected by childhoods spent, in fits and starts, in the rural Altmark region of Germany. These characters appear in their respective timelines: Alma (Hanna Heckt) during World War I, Erika (Lea Drinda) during World War II, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in East Germany during the 1980s, and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) in the post-unification 2020s. Across these different eras, one constant is the women’s shared experience of what Schilinski and her co-writer Louise Peter call “the little things, things that you have trouble putting in words, the hidden traumas that women live through.”

Like Woodman, then, Schilinski is interested in giving visual expression to these “hidden traumas.” Schilinski has acknowledged Woodman’s influence on the look of her film. In an interview included with the film’s press notes, she explained that, because she “wanted to tell the film from these extremely subjective points of view,” with “characters look[ing] at themselves again from the vantage point of another time,” she needed to find the “visual translation for this feeling.”

Under the care of cinematographer Fabian Gamper, Schilinski’s camera feels like its own character: floating through the time and space of the film, gazing on these girls throughout their lives. Sometimes the characters seem acutely aware of its gaze and stare back or flirt with the camera. Other times they look away, hoping to hide from its penetrating gaze. The effect adds a disquieting closeness between the viewer (the audience) and the viewed (the film’s characters). Like Woodman’s photographs, which play with surfaces to draw attention to her subjects’ depths, Schilinski’s film uses the bodies of its performers as a canvas on which to project that which remains unspoken, experiences located somewhere outside of time yet connected through it.

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Woodman spent the years between the age of 13 and her untimely death at 22 using the camera to capture the unmooring feelings that come with adolescence: the fear and joy of a body in flux. Her photographs reflect a keen awareness of the body’s place in space, and of the power she, as photographer, had over her subjects when she snapped a picture. Over the years, she transformed the art of self-portraiture into an exploration of the gaze itself—hers, ours, and the third gaze of the camera.

In her first photograph, taken when she was 13 with a camera given to her by her father, Woodman looks away from the camera, her long hair covering her face and neck. The wire she used to capture the image blurs the frame. She’s already in control of how she’s seen and, most importantly, when. In subsequent photographs, Woodman would further explore the potential of photographic blur, using both movement and long exposures to distort perception of space and time.

Shot in Providence, Rhode Island, between 1975 and 1976 while Woodman was still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, her Abandoned House series takes this fascination with perception to its most extreme. In one of her most iconic images, House #3, a bright light washes through an open window. Debris from the house’s crumbling walls clutter the worn wooden floorboards; paint splatters the walls themselves like a fresco. All of this is in focus while a young girl, Woodman, is barely visible, aside from one black Mary Jane in the center of the frame, daring you to see it. Her torso dissolves into the wall’s spackle, while her hair blends into the window frame. Her eyes look directly into the camera. The image deliberately obscures her intent. Is she hiding in plain sight daring you to see her, or hoping to disappear?

In the landmark 1986 essay “Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets,” Rosalind E. Krauss writes that the dilapidated structure featured in the Abandoned House series and its rich textures—its falling plaster, warped floorboards, and peeling wallpaper—are not what is to be examined. Instead, they are “used as surrogate surfaces, the elements that flatten someone.” As Krauss puts it, “everywhere in the field we make out the figure of Woodman […] Just out of sight, she is the field of experience, tiny, fragile, slid just beneath the skin.”

Schilinski similarly uses the farmhouse and the countryside of Altmark over the decades as “surrogate surfaces” through which the film can explore the lives of the girls who came of age in it. In one startling sequence early in the film, as Schilinski’s camera lingers on a ghostly white hallway, time shifts simply because a character from one era walks out of the frame and one from another era walks back into it. The effect on the viewer is unsettling, reminding us that the art of film allows for the disruption of linear time.

The film’s fluid temporality allows Schilinski to explore her obsession with the emotions and intergenerational traumas that connect these women and girls, to suggest that these connected feelings transcend the very concept of linear time. We see this exploration come into sharp focus when, in each era, the girls slowly learn that the body itself is also a liminal space. It belongs to you, but it’s never fully yours. It’s a lesson seven-year-old Alma gleans as she peers through keyholes and cracks in barn doors, witnessing acts of love and violence she cannot fully process. In one scene, for instance, her parents forcibly break the leg of her brother Fritz (Filip Schnack) so he can avoid service in the Great War; in another, their beleaguered dairymaid Trudi (Luzia Oppermann) eases his pain with a hand job. Decades later, teenage Erika moves through hallways in defiance, binding her leg with string (an allusion to Woodman’s 1976 photograph Horizontale, in which the artist bound her legs with clear ribbon, cutting it into segments like a spiral ham) in order to experience the world just like her incapacitated uncle, revealed to be the now grown-up Fritz (Martin Rother).

In the 1980s, teenager Angelika, Erika’s niece, experiences her own sense of liberation by gazing at her body in the mirror and exploring its sensual boundaries with boys in the farm’s barn. However, her pursuit is stifled by the incestuous desires of her uncle and her cousin, who cross physical and emotional boundaries to remind Angelika that, no matter how hard she tries, she is not in complete control of her own being. In the 2020s, preteen Lenka, Angelika’s granddaughter, scrunches herself against the house’s white weathered walls, imagining that life would be easier if she were someone else. Her thought echoes one her grandmother had decades earlier, that “you only ever see others from the outside, but never yourself.”

This desire to be someone else—to find autonomy elsewhere, in another body—is first set up in the 1910s, when Alma and her sisters discuss a Woodmanesque postmortem photograph of a young girl, possibly a lost sibling also named Alma, posed with a blurry-faced version of their mother. Alma becomes obsessed with recreating the image of the dead girl, seating herself on the same bench, with the same dolls, and in the same black dress. Although Alma merely mimics death, she later comes face-to-face with it when an older sister, Lia (Greta Krämer), chooses to die rather than live as an abused dairymaid, leaping to her death from a threshing wagon. A new posthumous photograph is taken, this time with the whole family surrounding the dead girl. Her eyes are sewn open to mimic life. Lia’s body is still not her own, even in death.

Two generations later, Angelika is ushered into a similar situation: made to pose for a family photograph next to the uncle who abused her. She cannot force the same fake smile her mother Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading) has mastered; she cannot endure the pain. Like Lia, she chooses to run, leaving her face nothing but a blur in the photograph. No one notices her taking flight in the moment. It’s only when the Polaroid develops that anyone realizes she is gone.

Voice-over narration lets us know that Angelika was looked for but never found. It’s implied that she fled to West Germany, crossing the same river where her aunt Erika and other women drowned themselves toward the end of World War II, seeking to avoid being raped or worse. The same river where Angelika’s mother Irm watched her sister Erika choose death but couldn’t follow her, a choice that has weighed her down with guilt ever since. But where Erika found her fate in the river and Irm found guilt, Angelika is able to find freedom—the freedom to start a family away from the farmhouse and its ghosts. Yet decades later, after the reunification of the country, Angelika’s daughter Christa (Luise Heyer) and her girls Lenka and Nelly (Zoë Baier) still find themselves back at the family home.

Does this, then, mean that pockets of strength are transmuted along with trauma? Does the body remember these exhilarating moments of independence as strongly as it does those moments that drown us under the weight of violence? Can we ever truly escape the feelings and sense memories that have been passed down to us?

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When I thought about “the hidden traumas that women live through,” and how they are transmuted through time, my mind drifted to other women-directed films that explore the same themes.

I thought of Small Deaths (1996), Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s lyrical graduation film, which traces these traumas of girlhood through three episodes of emotional violence witnessed or experienced by a girl named Anne-Marie (played by Ramsay’s niece) growing up in a Glasgow housing estate. Like Alma, Anne-Marie first appears in the film as a young child, watching a world she does not understand logically but intuits emotionally. Like Angelika, she learns that romance and violence often commingle, leaving behind a mind and body throttled with confusion.

I thought of Raven Jackson’s Nettles (2018), which examines girlhood and womanhood as a series of haunting moments and distressing encounters. In one of the film’s most potent sequences, a strange older man follows a young girl home from a store where she’d just bought some worms to go fishing. He watches from afar, his very presence a threat. Eventually she sprints away, leaving behind not just the bait she’d purchased but also the belief that she could move through the world in safety and comfort.

In Schilinski’s film, Angelika finds herself in such situations often, as men in her parents’ circle, family friends, and even her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) gaze on her body without her permission. They might place a hand just a little too close, behave in ways just a little too familiar, evoking a feeling of violation mixed with guilt. “I often pretended I didn’t notice how they looked at me, as if I were immersed in thought. But it was actually me who was secretly watching them looking at me,” Angelika shares in voice-over.

Like the main character of Smooth Talk (1985), Joyce Chopra’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966), Angelika navigates her lack of control but also her own power as she moves through the world in a body that is desired by others. In Chopra’s film, Laura Dern’s flirty wild child Connie faces down a predatory older man (Treat Williams) and, like Angelika, soon learns that girlhood often ends with a startling bang of stolen innocence, rather than with the murmurs of mutual first love.

Like these films, Sound of Falling leaves us unsure of the extent to which trauma and strength are intertwined, passed down in equal measure from one generation of women to the next. At the film’s end, the young Nelly, like her great-uncle Fritz a century before, climbs to the top of the threshing floor, no longer out of fear but rather out of the childhood curiosity she has inherited. Like her great-aunt Lia, she spreads her arms and leaps—this time not to escape a life of servitude and abuse but merely to see what it will feel like to fly. As a guilt-racked Lenka wonders what her little sister’s last thoughts were, the film cuts back to Alma and her sisters just as the storm comes to destroy their crop. They also spread their arms out, reaching toward the sky, their feet slowly lifting off the ground as they float into the air.

This final haunting imagery recalls several photographs taken by Woodman when she studied abroad in Rome. In one, her body blurs as she floats above her dilapidated surroundings, transcending them, as natural light floods in from the open window behind her. In another, she hangs from a doorframe, her arms outstretched like someone crucified, her face obscured. The room is busy with geometric tiles, and yet her body draws the viewer in by the sheer beauty of its nonchalant strength.

The women and girls who populate Sound of Falling similarly pull us into their orbit, daring us to see them, even if they cannot see themselves. They are always looking.