LAB OF CULTURAL, CREATIVE AND FESTIVAL JOURNALISM
FILM REVIEW: THE SWELL

A stranger walks through the desert alone, leaving footprints in the rusty sand. Helena Wittmann’s experimental short The Swell is a meditative vignette on evanescence.

Made for the Gent Film Festival’s 50th anniversary in 2023, it premiered as part of the 2x25 project, which brought together 25 composers and 25 directors to create a symbiotic collaboration.

Consisting of only two static-camera shots, each lasting roughly a minute, the film reduces cinema to its bare essentials. Framed in a wide long-shot, the vast desert landscape dominates the image, leaving the Walker (Gustavo Jahn) almost insignificant within it.

Although the camera remains fixed, it constantly trembles under the force of the wind, making the cinematic apparatus perceptible at all times. The image itself seems unstable, reminding us that the Walker is not alone — he is being watched...

A work so simple in its narrative yet so rich in suggestion invites viewers to project their own meanings onto its solitary figure. Throughout the two minutes, the Walker appears twice but disappears only once.

In the first shot, he enters the frame from below, moving in loose circular patterns before Wittmann cuts away just before he exits the image. In the second, he slowly emerges from behind a dune, blurred and almost spectral, as though he were nothing more than a mirage.

The film’s luminous palette and shifting light evoke associations both within and beyond cinema. One might think of Harry Dean Stanton in the opening sequence of Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), or of the expansive desert paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, whose landscapes similarly oscillate between physical presence and abstraction.

Equally essential is Arnaud Rebotini’s orchestral score, performed by the Brussels Philharmonic under the direction of Dirk Brossé. Rather than illustrating the image, The Swells music endows the journey of the Walker with an almost mythical dimension. As the stranger crosses the dunes, the wind gradually erases his footprints. What remains are not the traces themselves, but the awareness of their inevitable disappearance.

Review by Elif T. Erisik

German artist and filmmaker Helena Wittmann’s 2023 short The Swell, which was commissioned by the Gent Film Festival, opens on a hazy shot of vacant tangerine dunes in an unmarked land.

The eerie silence of the initial few seconds gives way to an orchestral arrangement with tinges of the well-known melody the Arabian riff — as an unnamed figure, aptly credited as “walker” (Gustavo de Mattos Jahn) — makes his ascent atop a hill dappled with weeds, leaving a trail of footprints in his wake.

The anonymous walker’s gait remains calm and resolved as he carves a path in the sand barefoot, passing from one side of the frame to the other.

The viewer is left to look for answers to such pedestrian questions as to where the walker is going, or why, in the compositional structure of Arnaud Rebotini’s score — which gradually swells, encouraging us to watch with our ears.

Halfway through the film’s two-and-a-half-minute runtime Wittmann cuts to the other side of the hill, as the walker makes his swift descent towards the camera.

The music reaches its climax just as he disappears from view, with only a snake-like path left to show that he was ever really there at all.

The existential drama inherent in one man’s journey across piles of coarse sand — set amid the backdrop of scorching heat and the perennial indifference of his surroundings — is reflected in the score's foreboding tone.

Throughout the history of film, much has been made about man’s ultimate helplessness when confronted with the full force of mother nature’s powers.

How small and inconsequential a mere mortal human body seems when placed in the middle of vast and empty landscapes that have preceded his existence as a lifeform: Sci-fi Urtexts like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, George Miller’s Mad Max franchise and J. C. Chandor's All Is Lost — this is the cinematic legacy upon which The Swell builds.

5th Lab of Cultural, Creative and Festival Journalism
European Film Festival Palić 2026