In Anna Sofie Hartmann’s debut feature Giraffe (2019), the underwater tunnel being built to connect Denmark with Germany is bestowed with a kind of cosmic inevitability. As the film begins, Dara Holmer (Lisa Loven Kongsli), an ethnologist, flicks through the channels of her car radio. A voice describing the movement of heavenly bodies is followed by another that tells us “Nothing seems to be able to stop the fixed link between Denmark and Germany.” Next, the mayor of Lolland, the Danish island where the tunnel will eventually emerge, visions the economic prosperity to come. Known as the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link, plans for the tunnel were ratified in 2009 and construction is projected to start in 2020; at 10.9 miles long, it will be one of the longest of its kind. Giraffe takes the construction of this real tunnel as the starting point for its fiction – Dara is studying the rural community and the landscape of Lolland, both of which are already changing, and her interviews with local residents chart a growing sense of loss. Projects of this immensity slice across the landscape, dragging life in their wake. Homes are demolished and highways creep forward. Lorries crawl towards the border and shipping crates wait patiently. The film does not open with the tunnel itself but with a shot of giraffes standing against a startling blue sky, and although my post-film reading tells me that the animals are most likely from the nearby Knuthenborg Safaripark, Giraffe’s preoccupation with the displacement and decontextualisation that globalisation entails makes this connection uncertain. Like the foreign workers drawn to the tunnel in search of higher wages, they could be from anywhere.
The giraffes are followed by the sleek movement of a ferry. Giraffe is filled with these kinds of juxtapositions: a small black cat framed by the industrial rectangle of a barn door, or wind farms set against a dark band of trees. Dara’s car snakes along a highway, passing a contingent of Polish builders on foot. Shot from a distance, they become part of the infrastructure on which they are working, merging with the industrial landscape. In a film obsessed by the textures of modernity, Dara works to secure the past. Through her, we encounter archives and archaeology, and the boundary between fiction and reality is often unclear. When she sits at her computer, a sequence of individual objects flickers across the screen, isolated against a black background. Elsewhere, still sepia photos describe another lost history. At all times Dara’s documentation has a mournful quality. Giraffe makes no explicit judgement on what we call progress, but a sense of dread is created through contrasts: natural and artificial, green vegetation and concrete, ethnologist and artefact. Loss enters the film as the past slips away, fixed momentarily on our screen and hers, but disappearing at the inevitable moment when attention moves on.
The film retains the cosmic mood of its opening and it does so to emphasise the helplessness of its subjects. From the Polish builder with whom Dara becomes romantically entangled, to her artist and academic friends back in Berlin with their talk of ‘creatives’ and the decreasing gap between life and brand, all are trapped within a silent and ever-expanding architecture of highways, bridges, ferries, lorries, and hotel rooms. If, as Hartmann’s juxtapositions suggest, the coming of a tunnel is analogous to the movement of stars, and the circulation of material goods can happen without a human figure in sight, then where can we locate agency or responsibility? Giraffe says nothing openly. The presence of Maren Eggert as a contemplative ferry worker signifies that we are in Schanelec territory, and the cryptic mood of the film as a whole bears this comparison out. Like Dara’s documentation, Giraffe is mournful – the receding of the past is also the receding of the natural world as we know it. “It’s sad that it will be covered in asphalt and turned into a highway,” Leif Nielson tells Dara, speaking of his family farm. “So that is sad – but that’s progress, you can’t stop it.”
Missouri Williams is a writer and medievalist based in London. She is the co-editor of Another Gaze.
