The Sounds of Insects

Peter Liechti might be called a filmmaker of sound. All of his works are infused by a extraordinary musical sensibility, no matter the films are focused specifically on music. IFFR pays tribute this year to this Swiss director with an extensive retrospective of his films. Liechti, who run for a Tiger Award in 1997 with his celebrated fiction movie "Martha’s Garden", is also presenting his last work, "The Sound of Insects. Records of a Mummy" . World premiering in Rotterdam, the film adapts Shimada Masahiko’s well known novel, "Miira Ni Narumade", about a man who commits suicide by starving himself to death.

 Liecthi first approach to the novel was through the listening the musical adaptation Otomo Yoshihide did years ago. When writing the script for the film, he erased some specific passages in order to arrive an international audience: neither Yukio Mishima nor Harakiri Japanese suicide ritual original references appear in it. In his correspondence with Mishima, Japanese writer and Nobel prize, Yasunari Kawabata, complained about the lost of meaning when Japanese literature is translated into an occidental language. On the other hand, Liechti has been able to express all the deepness within the Shimada Masahiko’s work. "The Sound of Insects" is an emotional trip towards death and, paradoxically, a celebration of life.

The film flows between three main elements: words, images and sounds interweave together in a kind of video-diary experience. The narrator never explains the reason for his suicide, he only tells the audience how little by little his body is dying, depicting all levels of physical suffering, while on the screen beautiful images evoke his last days. Last, but not least, the sound -the noises of wilderness, the waver of a river, the rainwater falling, the insects chirping- and the music, made by musician Norbert Möslang, complete this intense portrait of self destruction. At the end, "The Sound of Insects" might be a challenging proposal, but it is an extremely sensitive and sensual approach to one of the biggest taboos of human kind.

By Paula A. Ruiz (Trainee Project)