The Fall (2020): A flash in the dark.
Jonathan Glazer’s latest short film The Fall screened on BBC 4 to an unsuspecting audience; innocuously, like a jab from the ether. The six-minute short is a waking nightmare, terse, vivid and disturbing. The story is simple: A mob of masked hooligans hunt a person clinging for their dear life up a tree in a stygian forest. He is caught, photographed and taken to a deep well. A noose is tide around his neck and his sentence executed. The rope zips at break-neck speed down into the abyssal drop, accompanied by the synthesised tremolo of Mica Levi’s minimalist score.
However, the prosecuted man is still alive. Somehow, he clings to the walls of the well and begins his long, arduous climb back up before a silent cut to black.
Just like that the film is over.
Glazer and Cinematographer Tom Debenham play the action from a distance. Between the audience and the brutal display of mob mentality, there is a critical detachment. We watch the film through a passive lens and while what we see is disturbing, we merely play mute witness. At the beginning he places the camera down amongst the mob looking up at the prosecuted man hiding up the tree, but by the end the camera is placed in the well with the wide eyed, gnarling masks looking down on us. We have been turned on. Further, Glazer and Debenham’s use of light embeds pathos into the masked face of the prosecuted man. The low-key, high-angle lighting almost animates the visage, sculpting life and emotion out of the inert. When he looks up we see one expression and when he looks down at the abyss, the shafts of light make another.
The image of the persecuted man, held up to a phone camera and photographed by with his captors abreast is redolent of old photos of lynch mob’s from Americas haunted past. As Glazer explains in an interview with The Guardian, the image was inspired by a photo of Eric and Donald Trump Jr. holding a leopard shot on safari.¹ A snapshot of the brute idiocy that still proliferates in the West.
Although the film was distributed for general release on MUBI in May (when this review was originally written), I had heard about its unannounced screening on basic access Television. What a fun and exciting way to distribute a film. As the ability to lure audiences into a long form narrative grows increasingly difficult, The Fall demonstrates that it is much easier, and more interesting, to scatter a short film into the television sets of unsuspecting viewers. This is a fantastic display of the power of reception context and I hope it spurs on more filmmakers and distributors alike to play with the constraints of distribution in the future. I like to think that Glazer wanted to express his idea with an urgency that justified the disruption of the audiences standard viewing with his short film, as if to say, “This can’t wait, I need to tell you about how I feel the world is headed right now.”
I should say before I go any further, that this review is long overdue. You may be wondering why I bothered posting a review for a short film that’s been out for however many months now all of a sudden. The answer is simply that I believe The Fall is a painfully relevant wake up call. When people hide behind a mob mentality, they become anonymous and by that token are freed of culpability. Nowhere is this demonstrated more grossly than on internet forums and social media; platforms that can be exploited by their users to shield themselves from culpability behind a mask of anonymity, enabling the spread of racism, bigotry, idiocy and misinformation. The answer to this problem? There is no simple one, but a dam good start would be to call this behaviour out and hold websites such as Facebook to account when they allow lies to be spread unchecked.
Like the globular impressions left in the dark after a flash of light fades, the films final image stays with me; The persecuted man, arduously climbing up toward the light at the top of the well. But what hope is there for him in the world above? In the world of the hunter and the hunted? His odds are about as promising as they were when he was clinging to the tree at the beginning. This is the image of a man carted along by instinct alone; the chemical demand within him to survive. And that stays with you. What ever it is Glazer meant to carve out in those six minutes sits at the back of your mind, gnawing away.
You can catch The Fall on MUBI and I highly recommend you do.
- Catherine Shoard, Jonathan Glazer: ‘Nazism took hold like a fever. It’s happening again’ The Guardian’ interview with Jonathan Glazer, The Guardian, accessed on May 18th 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/27/jonathan-glazer-the-fall-nazism.
