Anatomy of a Fall - Lyrosophy As Truth
Thoughts On: Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
*Contains Spoilers*
When a father falls to his death, his wife must prove her innocence by revealing the depths of their relationship.
Anatomy of a Fall is a masterful courtroom drama (biodrama) that conjures an extremely articulate story of stories through superior patience in its direction and cinematography, and truly excellent screenwriting manifested by powerful performances that command the narrative with dialogue of domineering verisimilitude. In being a story about stories, Anatomy of a Fall demonstrates with such passionate precision the place of truth in stories and cinema. It shows us that, in stories and cinema, there is no truth; truth is an entity of reality inaccessible in its totality to consciousness. We witness this thanks to one basic decision: we are never presented an extradiegetic cut-scene confirming exactly how the father dies. This aligns us with all characters of the film (apart from the deceased husband), and therefore places us in their predicament: how can we know the truth without experiencing its reality? This is a predicament of being. There is only one solution to it: the reality in question must be found and experienced. This is not a completely possible solution, it is only partially possible. Once the instant of a moment of truth begins to pass through time, its reality can only be found and experience retrospectively; this is what all the courtroom sequences represent: a recounting of evidence that represents reality lost in time. It takes careful deliberation to arrive at an experience of truth through this retrospective investigation of reality, but truth itself is never completely ascertained: it never can be after all. Truth, again, does not exist in stories; it only exists in an instant as a slice of reality occupying a finite stretch of spacetime. But where truth fails and ceases to exists, there does not emerge in place a lie. In the consequences of the truth (being and reality that traces and transforms through time) rests the potential for discovery. It is the collision of experience and truth, this discovery, that compose the highest form of reality possible for humanity. This is to say that truth and reality are, in reality, only part of the formula for our existence; truth and reality across time, recognised as a transformation and transfiguring possibility, is that which humanity aspires to experience above all else.
Anatomy of a Fall allows this discourse to unfold through its courtroom sequences in laying bear the magic that is cinema; its highest capability: lyrosophy. I have previously outlined with much more detail what lyrosophy is. It is lyrical knowledge, a partner to scientific knowledge. This is an idea from Jean Epstein, filmmaker and theorists from the 1920s who, in my opinion, made the most valuable contributions to film theory. Epstein believed that scientific knowledge or reality was something of the present moment - just as we have described truth. A scientific experiment reveals a state of reality. He also believed that this scientific knowledge was incomplete without lyrical knowledge; or the knowledge itself being experienced. Anatomy of a Fall brilliantly demonstrates the dialectic. The sequences in the courtroom all present facts alongside interpretation. The facts are the reality and truth, but they mean nothing without deliberation, without being placed within a narrative that can be believed. The final interpretation of facts becomes the truth. This is a consequence of the arrangement or lyricism of facts composing reality and truth. The truth is a resonant entity; it has a frequency and harmony that lies do not. Harmony and balance are products of reality over time; the highest form of truth. We believe in that which rings true, that which has a harmony and lyricism to it, with the inherent understanding that reality functions with just such a harmony and lyricism. This is the major conjecture of Epstein's lyrosophy, or lyric knowledge. It is the suggestion that the most complete form of truth requires the sensation of what I would posit to be Tao; the way of things that cannot be known totally, but that we nonetheless experience and live as a part of. One cannot know the everything, the truth, of an instant of reality. One's eyes are not at all wide enough to see all of reality at once, even in an instant. The only hope and key pendulum of our existence hinges upon the sensation of the rhythm of the way of life.
Embodying lyrosophy and the distinction between experienced truth and reality, is the dog of Anatomy of a Fall. This is the final trigger of the narrative that manifests punctum and affect that contain conclusive truth. Epstein writes: Science looks for causes through the study of effects. Lyricism creates causes in proportion to effect, that is, it invents them. Science locates cause, but lyricism (the rhythm and pattern of reality manifest through stories) presents one with an imitation of truth that we believe. This is what Epstein suggests in saying that lyricism 'invents' causes; he indicates that it passes on a cause in proportion to effect. In other words, lyricism translates the experience of a lost reality so its truth can be found again. The dog being sick after ingesting aspirin, hence proving to the son that his father was suicidal, is at once a scientific and lyrical reproduction. It is a moment that not only finds an effect, but demonstrates one effect to be resonant across time and a greater narrative, which generates powerful emotion in the child, conjuring the truth of the entire court case. The dog therefore embodies the essential nature of an experience of knowledge over the simple recording of fact in the film and its exploration of story. This is why the dog in bed with the mother is the final shot; she clings to its being as the highest truth in her life, its photogénie - its image's ability to allow her son to see the reality she perceives - her saviour.
Such is simply the start of Anatomy of a Fall's drama. Traced over this evocation of the actual being of truth and the persistence of lyrospohy is a sad story of lost love and blindness. So though this narrative is concerned above all else with the location of truth, it is a tragedy whose sorrows lie in the fact that truths must be felt, and to not be able to tell your story is to not be able to be felt in the world. As much as the mother then struggles to translate her truth and have people believe or feel her knowledge, she always succeeds; in selling her books, winning her court case and retaining the trust and love of her son. It ultimately her husband that failed above everyone in his evocations, and it is because he lived in a lie, a false story that we are left to see to be his demise. Unable to see his son's strength and humanity, only his own inhumanity via mistakes made, the father drowns in self-pity unable to conjure the strength to persist in life. And such is the melancholy fact that his family must fight to win - but, yet, it is to their salvation. Manifesting its own--while demonstrating--lysrosophy, Anatomy of a Fall is pure brilliance.
Thank you Hamsa
