hello
[estimated read time: 15-20 min, ~2500 words]
Introduction
Winter Afternoon, alongside Vision Fugitive, completes the diptych of performance films conceived to reconsider the act of translating music to the screen. What began as a second one-shot film with elaborate camera choreography was reduced here to nine fixed frames—nine uninterrupted shots existing side by side. Visual considerations for Franz Schubert's music had already begun to form in my mind a few weeks before filming Vision Fugitive, when I was tasked with performing a Schubert recital on a fortepiano.
The return to the context of a historical instrument proved invaluable. While few innovations from early 19th-century Viennese workshops remain on the modern piano, this intense period of piano gadgetry demonstrates an overarching pursuit of contrast and unusual effects. Where historic instruments may fall short in mechanics or grand dynamic range, they compensate with a spectrum of alternative sound worlds, unparalleled in their capacity to create atmospheres of intimacy and transparency. These effects are entirely in line with compositional intentions, and Schubert often echoes these capabilities through his dynamic markings and choice of register.
More importantly, they are evident in extreme shifts of character. For example, in his second Moment Musical, in the span of a single measure, we arrive from a double pianissimo to a sudden forte, with no harmonic or dynamic bridge. The forte abruptly inserts a transformed F-sharp minor, an absolute antithesis to the preceding stillness of A-flat major. Were Schubert a filmmaker, this could be a jump cut. His episodic nature and wild modulations closely mirror montage techniques: this is a surface brimming with possibilities for both camera choreography and editing. Nevertheless, the temptation to respond visually to all of these points encountered friction with a memory of observing Trevor Pinnock’s rehearsal process for Schubert’s Ninth Symphony. While working through the second movement, Pinnock paused to ask: "But why are you so active here? Nothing is happening."
As musicians, we are trained to be rigorous in our approach to the score. Every marking holds value. However, it takes another kind of discipline, after all has been said, learned, and studied, to walk away from this type of engagement and achieve expression. Pinnock’s comment offers a valuable insight for filmmakers: even though we may consider every detail, not every detail warrants an active response. There are a myriad of effects at play in specific compositions, especially in the expansive forms of Schubert. Sometimes, a kind of detachment is needed to create certain senses of time, structure, and space.
Rethinking the Uninterrupted Shot
Building on the experience of Vision Fugitive, I returned to the technique with Pinnock’s idea of stillness as a point of departure. Long, static camera holds would be integral to a choreography of suspense. Some pieces would be stationary, others would have only a handful of camera motions. An absence of montage does not mean an absence of movement. Without edits, the uninterrupted shot still follows a logic that traces the linear development of an event through an array of compositions, from wide shots to close-ups. While constructed without cuts, the frame is perpetually refreshed through movement, depriving the eyes of closure. In the pursuit of real time, it also risks coming dangerously close to non-time, rushing from one sensation to the next. For Winter Afternoon, I needed to move from dynamism toward a meditative experience.
My other obsession was with the edges of sound and image. Connecting music and silence well is extraordinarily difficult. Bridging a moving image to emptiness presents a similar challenge. Aside from the literal border of the frame holding the composition, the edge of the image is, most importantly, the atmosphere at the beginning or end of a shot. Images held steadily for a longer duration give the eye a chance to explore the entire frame. Beyond a certain point, they have the potential to foster a different kind of viewer participation. In the words of Paul Schrader, “after the smash cut, the viewer is propelled unthinking through the ongoing narrative. After the delayed cut, the viewer is frozen outside the narrative.”
A parallel emerges with the music of Morton Feldman, who pays careful attention to the way sound is evoked and finished in his compositions, or as he would describe them, canvases: “the attack of a sound is not its character. Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing - leaving us rather than coming towards us.” In montage, we often see the change of image rather than the image itself. The delayed cut accesses another space in the mind where the image exists. It is the sustain of the image, the decay of stimulation, that offers the choice to engage with the previously unseen.
Filming Schubert
Like Vision Fugitive, there were two allotted production days, the first of which was spent on rehearsing camera movement and lighting. Unlike Vision Fugitive, everything was running ahead of schedule, and a complete run-through was done by the end of the first day. Then, something unexpected happened. The footage had no shake or technical flaws; the composition was good, and the camera movement logical. Lighting and movement could be refined further, and there was still time for additional rehearsals. However, everything appeared sterile and lifeless. The clarity of the improved camera and lens were striking. By completely mitigating visual noise and shake, the merits of one-shot choreography had also been mitigated. The absence of any human-induced accidents made the entire process feel robotic.
Just as in music, if technique is only as good as how it may be used in service of a musical idea, solving technical challenges in filmmaking through technology alone does not guarantee artistic value. If in Vision Fugitive the human aspect of the camera rig opened an unexpected aesthetic dimension, the “flawless” steadicam of the second attempt became a trap of mechanical routine. Thus, what began as a one-shot film was transformed into nine fixed frames, and the definition of the new camera rig needed to become an intense psychological participant in a different way. For Winter Afternoon, the visual direction was changed on the morning of the final recording day because the most convincing aspects of our test footage were the still sequences: Schubert was too fragile to permit any camera motion under these circumstances. What if this direction were developed to the extreme to create a new shooting script? The process returned to a crucial axiom of Schubert’s signature: his logic of time.
In pursuit of these nine fixed frames, all filmmaking decisions needed to be reevaluated. If the entire performance was to be expressed through only nine camera positions, musical intent would have to be concentrated solely in frame composition, order, and lighting. While the original programme would remain intact, each frame would now present itself both as a self-contained phenomenon and as part of a greater whole. No angle would be reused. The sharpness of the chosen lens would be used to achieve maximum subtlety within the frame, a crucial aspect for sequences that may at first appear to be doing nothing. The absence of linear development was the real opportunity to involve time differently. To remember the words of Bela Tarr, the “story”, the “information/cut/action/cut” paradigm needed to be obscured and destroyed: “maybe a piece of wall, or when you are just watching the landscape…is also a part of time – and also part of our lives and you cannot separate that.”
Tarr does not imply that we must only film literal reality. On the contrary, his films are highly stylized. Instead, Tarr is seeking to establish a rhythm with points beyond a concrete narrative. This is an endeavour to create an antagonistic pace and gradual sensory revelation, while capturing imperceptible gestures and completely reconfiguring audience perception.
Nothing is happening
With the uninterrupted shot off the table, a strict order of recording was no longer necessary. The first music attempted — the eventual eighth frame — was the Andantino. Before any visual idea for the Schubert project, I envisioned this movement as the core point of the entire programme, not just the sonata. If Bresson chose the single C-sharp major phrase as the crux of Au Hasard Balthazar, I needed to position the entire Andantino as the surrealist heart of the film — a parallel reality that would create an axis on which the sonata would rotate. The lighting of the gleaming white frame-within-a-frame, reducing the piano to a silhouette, was designed to create a vacuum, detaching it from the surrounding music and frames.
Schubert’s Andantino is at once mystic and religious, but also filled with violence and emptiness. By choosing a wide shot, I forfeited the fine detail of keyboard gestures and opted to obscure physicality. I desired to underline the hypnotic quality of Schubert’s monotonous opening repetition. This portal behind the piano would veil any explicit hand synchronization until the culminating arrival points, urging grand hand gestures. I imagined this space as a visual counterpoint to Schubert’s third dimension as described by Alfred Brendel, just as the trill in the opening of the Sonata D960. The intense visual contrast would echo the extremes of early 19th-century piano technology, with this lighting deployed solely as an accent for this frame. The composition of the Andantino, along with frames two and six, is a play on mixed realities, where it is unclear whether the image directly corresponds to the sound production. Indeed, the sound presented is the actual sound, and the microphones were removed from the eighth frame in post-production to heighten audiovisual uncertainty.
Is the Andantino the first time we hear this music in the programme? No. It paves a direct link to Schubert’s second Moment Musical, also an Andantino, where, without any sign, an enharmonic modulation introduces the same F-sharp minor key of the second movement in the sonata. Thus, the second Moment Musical, frame two, was recorded immediately after frame eight, to mirror the rhythmic reference point and lilt of the sonata’s Andantino. The frame composition would also be a wide shot; however, it would have no hands visible at all. I imagined the first six frames, dedicated to the Moments Musicaux, evoking an atmosphere of lieder, intimate gatherings akin to a candlelit Viennese salon. These images needed to challenge the sound's precise origin and suggest no particular venue. In these pieces, voices tangle and intertwine, creating parallel worlds where boundaries remain unclear. Thus, without the presence of hands to give away the preparatory gesture, and in addition to the stillness of image (save for the faint smoke in the background), the second theme not only remains congruent to the original tempo (contrary to performance practice, there is in fact no tempo change indicated by Schubert between the first and second subjects), but becomes a genuine auditory surprise in the second Moment Musical.
Considering the rest of the Moments Musicaux in terms of harmony, the keys ushered in a variation of shots, near and distant. I imagined the third and fifth as a pair (key of F), the second and sixth as another (key of A-flat), the fourth a kind of bridge (C-sharp minor), and the first as an introduction (C major) with those distanced, repeating calls of the post-horn in octaves, Schubert’s beloved signal of departure. Thus, the first Moment Musical features a rhetorical establishing shot that evokes distance. The third Moment Musical required visual emphasis on the left hand, an impulse for the gentle syncopation that guides the entire piece. I always felt the fifth needed to be approached attacca. While each piece in Winter Afternoon became self-contained, subtle dialogues could still be established between frames. I composed the fourth and fifth frames with this attacca in mind, hinting continuity through a mirror of the hands.
The further we go in the set, the more surreal Schubert becomes: a great master of illusion. The final Moment Musical is suspended amid sighs and dissonances that keep compounding together. Schubert does everything in his power to avoid the feeling of resolution. The ultimate cadence, dissolving into an unharmonized octave, is utterly desolate. Just a moment before, he tries to point us to a different key altogether — the A major of the sonata that immediately follows in the programme. This Moment Musical warrants a frame composition that could come as close as possible to what Michel Chion once described as audiovisual dissonance, akin to what we feel in music as harmonic dissonance. Thus, it became at once the most personal close-up: perpetually suspended, with neither hands to pinpoint the music nor a clear spatial anchor. It is the return of Chion’s acousmêtre, music becoming the hidden offscreen voice first observed in frame two. It serves to severely disorient and jar the audioviewer, presenting maximum contrast before resolving to the spatially explicit opening shot of the sonata.
The frames that captured the first, third, and fourth movements of the sonata needed to be parallel with the composition of the initial Andantino image, showing both a direct relationship and evolution. Suppose the defined theatre (appearing for the first and last time) of the first movement of the sonata serves to clearly resolve the frame of the sixth Moment Musical. In that case, it also allows for maximum contrast on the other side, preceding the gleaming frame of the second movement. Furthermore, it permitted frame nine, which holds the third and fourth movements together, to be composed on the same camera axis, this time with no visible theatre or frame-within-a-frame. The decision to combine the sonata's Scherzo and Finale into a single frame stemmed from the same desire to heighten the sense of parallel realities. This time, the emphasis would not be visual, but musical. Despite the difficulty of performing both movements without pause, I was compelled to capture the Finale beginning attacca, as if it was already in process under the Scherzo. The Scherzo becomes a wandering thought, away from the actual subject matter that begins with the Finale. Schubert constantly disrupts our dramaturgical flow; he allows us to get lost in these moments. This logic of time, episodic and with loss of direction, is most evident in the final moments of the sonata. Here, Schubert attempts to start the theme four times, punctuates each attempt with silence, and then abandons the music altogether to leap into a flourishing coda.
The Final Frame
What happens after the performance of a late Schubert sonata? Applause? Silence? These are concerns of a live concert platform, not a film. Up until this moment, there are nine frames, each different, recorded in a single venue that has been obscured to lose homogeneity, appearing akin to a Deleuzian éspace quelconque, or any-space-whatever.
Nevertheless, something is missing. In this space, cinema offers an opportunity to mark a return to the beginning. A variation on Andrei Tarkovsky’s music as refrain. Frame ten is the only image that repeats in Winter Afternoon, an identical twin of the opening shot, serving a double purpose: it is a visual return, and a spotlight on key harmonies of the sonata that came just a moment before. Aside from the lyrical trio, another dream within a dream, the C-sharp minor minuet is a strange piece, a sort of anti-music. We know Schubert for his far-reaching symphonies, sonatas, and song cycles. Yet, it is in these outcast pieces that he finds his ultimate mark of virtuosity, a moment where he can reduce all expression into one note, like a single-stroke painting by Hokusai. The end is a single C-sharp: a transformation from the C major of the first Moment Musical, and a shadow of the C-sharp harmony that marks the summit of the sonata’s Andantino — a single winter afternoon reduced to one ascending half step.