Becoming Invisible
Still from ‘Wood and Water’
Some years ago, in an interview in ‘The Paris Review’, the poet Mary Ruefle spoke about ‘invisibility’ - a topic, she said, that all women talk about. ‘Men don’t become invisible in the same way’, she remarked; ‘for the longest time, male power was posited in the accumulation of wealth or experience, and experience was something every man could have. And a woman’s power was always posited on physical attractiveness, the ability to have children. So as a man ages, he gains power, and as a woman ages, she loses it, or feels as though she does’. Nevertheless, she added, the process of becoming ‘invisible’, although it might feel bittersweet, can bring us closer to our deepest essence.
‘Wood and Water’, Jonas Bak’s beautiful and sensitively modest film - released in 2021, it is his first feature - concerns Anke, a widowed older woman, who is becoming ‘invisible’. Convincingly played by the director’s mother, Anke lives in a small town in the Black Forest region of Germany and has just retired from her career as a church secretary. Deciding to commemorate the occasion with a trip to the northern seaside where she raised her children, she looks forward to a family reunion. On their arrival, however, she receives a text from her son, Max, saying that he can’t leave Hong Kong because of the government’s suppression of pro-democracy protests.
Although Anke, who always appears somewhat withdrawn, doesn’t express overt disappointment, it is clear that she finds this turn of events painful, especially in the context of all the changes that she sees around her old home; ’Time has gone’, she says, ‘and it won’t return’. The first part of the film makes much of Anke’s sense of alienation; unable to look forward, she dwells in the past, living in memories of her happiest years. The second is more expansive, reflective of the consequences of the journey she takes to Hong Kong to see her son. Arriving in the middle of the night, only to find that Max isn’t at his apartment, Anke finds herself adrift in a place where everything is unfamiliar and a little threatening; although vulnerable and alone, she is nonetheless able to draw on inner strength and copes with the difficulties. She soon begins to explore the city on her own and makes connections with local people - the doorman at Max’s apartment, Max’s doctor, a fortune-teller, and a social activist - and while far from comfortable in the unforgiving urban intensity of Hong Kong and its alarming social protests, Anke feels sympathy for those she watches and encounters, gradually beginning to feel part of her new environment. She lives in the present, and because of this, her worries about her son are replaced by confidence and peace, even though he never appears in the film.
Challenges provide Anke with opportunities for kindness and benevolence rather than sadness and fear, and she learns to dissolve her unease and unhappiness by seeking fulfilment in unremarkable activities and mundane human interactions. She remains reserved and unassuming, and the film successfully avoids the familiar cinematic trope of finding enlightenment or joy on the road or in a demanding environment, opting instead for restrained reflections on alienation, depression and anxiety. Brian Eno’s soundtrack suits this mood perfectly. And although it focuses on Anke and her growing ‘invisibility’, ‘Wood and Water’ is also attentive to more general issues relating to family ties, growing older, and the difficulty of finding meaningful interconnections in a chaotic or disordered world.
Chinese cosmology, infused with the Taoism of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, proposes that humanity is embedded in a universal generative and transformative process in which ‘non-being’ is transformed into ‘being’ and then returns to the void, a procedure that is embodied and illustrated by the cycle of natural seasons. Bak’s film also suggests that everything in life, even the apparently permanent, will pass away, and that we can overcome related distress by deciding to move with, rather than resist, its flow. It becomes clear, too, that despite nature seeming to be instilled with a comforting sense of stillness and harmony while urban living is always in uneasy flux, this opposition is false. Traditional Chinese thought holds that the universe is founded on five elements - water, wood, metal, fire, and earth - and that they are interrelated. It is this concept, and its relevance to the crucial episode where Anke has her fortune read, that gives rise to the title of the film. She is told by the fortune-teller, whom she comes across by chance in an arcade, and whose long-winded comments in Chinese are translated by the elderly social activist she briefly befriends, that her dominant element is ‘water’, which means that she is ‘noble’ and highly respected by other people. Her weak point, he says, is a lack of ‘wood’, and this is one of the reasons why her children have left her alone at home. Water, in Chinese cosmology, is associated with winter, which is a period of retreat, stillness, and contraction; wood is connected with spring, a period of growth vitality, and movement. Anke looks a little sceptical when she learns her fortune , but a following scene suggests that she dreams about a forest later that night.
Jonas Bak has explained that his film is structured around dualities: rural and city living, Eastern and Western spirituality, worry and peace of mind, being alone and being with other people. ‘I imagine’, he said, ‘the two parts as a long, deep breath in and a breathing out; first you take in the worries and loneliness, the void of retirement, and then you allow yourself to breathe and move on from it. A bit like meditation, a non-dualistic journey of healing, attempting to dissolve polarity between things like science and spirituality, the personal and political, time and space’. Just before ‘Wood and Water’ comes to an end, we are shown Anke gazing out of Max’s apartment window at night, as she has often done before. The following morning she practices Tai Chi with the doorman outside in the sunshine, their hands and arms moving slowly and harmoniously in tune with each other and with the flow of inner energy. Then we see her walking in the street among the crowds, observed by a camera from on high, and the shot is followed by a panorama of Hong Kong skyscrapers. Anke has become invisible.
For further exploration:
Mary Ruefle’s interview: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/12/12/becoming-invisible-an-interview-with-mary-ruefle/
The trailer for ‘Wood and Water’, which is currently showing on MUBI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-1km5xtvRQ
A conversation with Jonas Bak about ‘Wood and Water’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVcff6DktJQ
A dramatic documentary by the artist Ai Weiwei about the Hong Kong protests: https://archive.org/details/cockroach-ai-weiwei-films
Kate Bush’s song ‘How To Be Invisible’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukPIbOtbDOU
Still from ‘Wood and Water’