Maya Schweizer. A Tall Tale

About

In Schweizer’s film A Tall Tale, produced in 2017, various levels of time and narration coalesce into a collective memory. Initially, the camera explores the real setting of a green summer landscape, interspersed with the ruins of World War II bunkers. Suddenly the voice of Orson Welles resonates from off-camera, inviting the viewer into a “short story, straight from the haunted land of Ireland”, for, as the voice continues, “there’s no place in the world so crowded with the raw material of tall tales”. In quick succession, Schweizer then interweaves black-and-white snippets of found footage and sound fragments from film noir into a brilliant, fantastical story, such as those once orally passed down from generation to generation in Medieval Ireland: “obviously, it’s a very fantastic and improbable story”.

This is accompanied by the tower, soaring tall as a beacon (or mysterious cipher), out of the ruins of Askeaton Castle, an early 13th century Norman fortress on the banks of the River Deel, with its surrounding waterways ringing with an uncanny chorus of croaking frogs. The tower crystalizes into the concrete artistic focal point for a fictional chain of memories that stretches all the way back to the time of Gothic horror stories. The caws of real ravens observed nesting in the ruins, and echoed in black-and-white closeups of more cawing ravens, together with the cracks and crevices, explored almost tenderly by the camera, in the old walls, are interwoven with the fictional narrative, which conjures up in image and sound Edgar Allan Poe’s classic horror story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839):
“A thin crack extending from the roof, down the front of the building, and into the adjacent lake”, observes the narrator, as he arrives at the House of Usher. Even the horse, restlessly pawing with its hooves, refers to the rider approaching the House of Usher.

Schweizer combines film noir stylistic devices such as strong dark-light contrasts and extreme high- and low-angle shots with deconstructed story fragments from psycho-thrillers and detective stories such as the invisible man (l’homme invisible), from haunted houses, from crushing mental demoralization due to supernatural phenomena, from love triangles, and from deceptions and murder (see H.-G. Clouzot, Les Diaboliques, 1955). However, she always links the level of the “film spirits”, which is only ever implied, back to real elements from the present, in this way making the story ‘probable’. Thereby the eerie atmosphere permeating A Tall Tale is most notably created by the film's suggestive sound track.

With her stories of ruins and of filmic ruins, Maya Schweizer refers not only to the ambiguity of memory, which (for the artist) can be both fruitful and a hindrance, but also to the great “spirits” of cinema who have left their mark on cinematic history to this day. “Do you believe in ghosts?”, the philosopher played by Jacques Derrida is asked in Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983). Derrida’s answer may also be Schweizer’s answer: “The cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms. That’s what I think the cinema is about when it’s not boring. It’s the art of allowing the ghosts to come back.”