Silent Friend’s narrative is dominated by three human characters who each have compelling stories, but it is a tree—Ginkgo biloba—that serves as the film’s protagonist. The humans serve as contrast with the Ginkgo to tell a story about perspective, connections, and self-discovery. Silent Friend reaches across species and history to say that expanding your perspective can not only lead to new relationships, but also teach you about yourself.
The movie’s three human characters are Tony, Hannes, and Grete, each of whom have some relationship to plants during their time, at different points in history, in the university’s garden that houses the Ginkgo tree. Grete is the first woman to be admitted to the university, challenging norms both within and beyond the university, and harbors an appreciation for nature that exceeds an academic interest. Hannes is a German student who grew up on a farm and initially resents plants because they represented labor: to him plants were synonymous with crops needed to be tended and reaped. Tony discovers a love for plants, begins frequenting the university’s greenhouse, and uses his neuroscientific training as he attempts to relate to the Ginkgo tree. In different ways, Grete, Hannes, and Tony explore a relationship with plants and nature, that expands their perspective, allowing them to relate to others, and a better sense of self.
Tony
When Tony is introduced, he appears sociable: working with children as research subjects, having an awkward dinner with fellow faculty members, and navigating a clumsy conversation with his subordinate indicates honed social skills. Perhaps they are honed to a fault—at the dinner, his peers had ordered for him, and he eats the meal with barely perceptible hesitation. It doesn’t agree with him: he vomits the meal in the next scene.
In contrast, his relationship with the Ginkgo tree is unforced even to the point of defiance. Without directive from the tree and despite risking his academic career, Tony takes initiative and works to learn more about it. He applies his training in neuroscience to explore the tree’s consciousness and, as if attempting to empathize with the tree, Tony tries to parallel the tree’s experience: when it rains, Tony takes a shower.
But Tony’s experiments with the tree lead to passive aggressive conflict with the university’s groundskeeper who is wary of the sensors piercing the surrounding soil and attached to the tree’s trunk. Recognizing that the groundskeeper also has the tree’s interests at heart, Tony engages him and asks his cooperation in working to learn more about the tree. Where Tony would have previously deferred to social norms and avoid conflict, Tony’s journey of self-discovery—from developmental to botanical neuroscience—leads to a more proactive and self-fulfilling attitude.
Hannes
Hannes’s attitude to others is stand-offish at the start of the movie. Hannes is introduced by himself and doesn’t speak to anyone for the entirety of his first scene. His first encounter with Gundula, who represents the only major interpersonal relationship, in her garden is tense at first: Gundula tends to her garden and has a fondness for plants while Hannes, to her frustration, remarks that plants represent toil and tedium because he grew up on a farm and had to work with crops. However, you can tell Hannes wants to find community and, as he walks through the university, Hannes looks fondly at those lounging on the lawn and he smiles, albeit briefly, at a classmate walking past him.
It’s his developing relationship with Gundula that serves as a catalyst for discovering a love for plants. Hannes reads books about botany and shares information that may help her garden. When Gundula asks him to watch a special peony while she is away, he closely guards it. This connection with plants is not transactional, only driven by Gundula’s request. It develops into a love for plants in and of itself: he tends to the whole garden, he interacts with the peony in increasingly anthropomorphic ways, and Gundula doesn’t reappear later in the film to remind him to care for the plants. Although the initial motivation was to spark an interpersonal relationship, his relationship with Gundula leads Hannes to develop his own love for plants.
Grete
Grete’s journey is one purely of self-discovery, which differs from Hannes’s and Tony’s stories. Like Tony, she does meet someone through her connection to nature, but unlike Tony her character arc ends with pictures of herself rather than spending time with another person. Like Hannes, her love of plants develops, but unlike Hannes, her love of plants was pre-existing and changes rather than grows. She is introduced as a botanical student with an apparent motivation to succeed academically, but her story ends with abstract self-portraits of herself rather than dissected plants or any of her companions, underscores that connecting with others also means connecting with yourself.
Silent Friend eschews the expected character arc of many female characters who face many disadvantages that they eventually overcome through grit or community. Grete is indeed born into a world that spells adversity for many women. Women are just now being allowed into higher education and Grete is the only one of many admitted into the university—one even wonders if this is only because Grete demonstrates a stunning level of expertise by not only reciting text verbatim, but also deftly defending her position. As her male peers gawk, one even remarks that she is getting special treatment from the teaching assistant who does linger too closely and for an awkward amount of time, which shows the double jeopardy she faces: she did not ask for the special treatment, but she is nevertheless the victim of it.
Grete’s character arc differs from Hannes and Tony because it is clear she already harbored a connection with the natural world before the events of the film take place. Grete recites Carl Linnaeus’s botanical text and explains that Linnaeus’s taxonomy was based on plants’ reproductive characteristics, which implies that she was at least interested enough in botany and plants to accrue such specific knowledge. Further, the turning point of Grete’s story involves her being kicked out of room and board for spending time in the forest where she and other women spend time appreciating nature. The secretive nature of the group implies that Grete had sought the group out rather than coming across them by chance or through outreach.
Faced with living on the streets, Grete takes up an apprenticeship with a local photographer which leads to a new avenue for growth. Initially rejected by the photographer who hesitantly believed that a young woman learning photography would be improper, she cleverly shows her potential and interest in the trade: It is here that the film showcases how exploring different perspectives—not only that you meet others—leads to growth or, in Grete’s case, self-discovery. The photographer shows how methodical use of light and positioning of the camera can drastically change the end photograph. Momentarily, Grete tries to leverage her new photography skills to continue her academic career and it’s implied her newfound skills endears her to her peers, but the film declines this predictable narrative and instead dedicates a considered amount of time of her story’s resolution with shots of Grete arranging the camera to take Escher-esque pictures of flowers then herself. By adopting new perspectives, strategically positioning her metaphorical lighting and camera, Grete’s long-standing relationship with nature and herself has considerably changed.
Light and Linger
Light as a metaphor harkens back to the opening scenes of the film, but the film also constantly uses lingering shots to emphasize its idea of the benefits of varying your perspective. Where the use of light calls to attention what humans see—and what we are missing—lingering shots underscore what things we give—and don’t give—our time.
When Tony introduces the ‘flashlight’ and ‘lantern’ models of consciousness. The flashlight model seems to reference William James’s ‘spotlight’ model of attention, which compares visual attention as being like a spotlight: light is shined at a point and also illuminates the adjacent space, but neglects things outside of the spotlight’s ‘border’. The flashlight model is introduced to imply that human adults’ attention has narrowed. In the film, Tony also describes the ‘lantern’ model, which he believes more accurately describes a human child’s attention. That is, a human children’s attention is more like a lantern, with light shining in all directions, because children’s perspective is more expansive and open.
That Silent Friend opts not to bring back the lantern model as Grete’s character arc resolves is a clever and optimistic comment. Instead of Grete having more lights for photography, Grete becomes more comfortable moving the few studio lights around in increasingly distinct arrangements. Silent Friend is refraining from a return to child’s lantern-like, expansive world view, and instead suggests that we should only try to be more intrepid with our attention, be more willing to shine light on things beyond our usual borders.
In addition to light, Silent Friend will also use deliberately paced cinematography to push our perceptual comfort zone. Where movies will often cut away to a new subject once the viewer has gotten the gist of the scene or the character has said their piece of dialogue, Silent Friend will spend time on a single subject who sometimes doesn’t have a single word to say and long past you have recognized the character or what they are wearing.
There are several lingering shots in the movie that gives you pause, but perhaps the most prominent example of this is when Tony wears an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap in the shower. In one of his attempts to empathize with the Gingko, when it begins raining on the tree, Tony dons the cap to measure his brain waves in the shower. The shot is of Tony showering, and his physique is set against a dark background. The nudity is there, but it’s not what the source of discomfort. Instead, the camera slowly zooms out and Tony stays on screen longer than is needed to extract available visual information. The duration of the shot instead subjects the viewer to the tree’s inanimate experience: we can turn off the shower, but the tree can only weather the elements whatever they may be.
Another notable shot is between people. Hannes, after meeting Gundula, moves into her co-op. Gundula gives him the tour and eventually shows Hannes his room. After taking some moments to settle into his new space, Hannes places his typewriter on the windowsill and begins working. As he does, the film cuts to an exterior shot of Hannes working in the window and the camera slowly begins to pull out. The transition is so gradual, you again take pause, until you realize that Gundula is also working at her windowsill and is slowly coming into frame. Then, you understand that the film is underscoring Hannes’s growing social circle: Gundula has come into his view, has become part of his world.
The last lingering shot of Silent Friend is also its final scene. After the human character arcs are resolved, Silent Friend the same way it began: featuring its primary protagonist. The film cuts a shot of the Gingko’s trunk, then begins to zoom out. Like before, the zoom out is slow and almost uncomfortable. First, the lower branches come into view. Then, after you feel like something should have happened on screen, the mid-point of the canopy comes into view. Finally, the whole tree is framed and the zoom-out stops, but the shot lingers. You begin scanning the edges of the frame for more stimuli—your eyes scan the meadow in the foreground, the treeline in the background, and the clear blue sky. Eventually, the shot fades into night and, over what feels like two minutes, there are several opportunities when you think it would cut to the end credits. Still, the shot lingers and, just when you think this isn’t the end, the night sky fades to black and the credits roll. The length of and action within the shot is the film’s thesis: if only you took a step back, if only you look around, then you would realize there’s more time than you think and there’s more to see than you think.
Strange As It Is 