On Falling

But it is not in this spirit [of charity] that the new schemes of benevolence are conceived. [...] They are celebrated as the beginning of a new moral order [...] in which the possessors of property are to resume their place as the paternal guardians of those less fortunate; and which, when established, is to cause peace and union throughout society, and to extinguish, not indeed poverty – that hardly seems to be thought desirable – but the more abject forms of vice, destitution, and physical wretchedness.
Arthur Helps – Edinburgh Review, April 1845, vol. 81, issue 164, p. 505

Much has been written already about Laura Carreira’s remarkable debut, not all of it apropos. My instinct is that On Falling should be understood, chiefly, as a carefully balanced act; as a film caught in-between two structures and two looks: one personal, one collective.

As a study of character, On Falling is built around an individual – Aurora – a reserved Portuguese migrant who lives with other working-class people in a dimly-lit flat in Edinburgh, and happens to work as a picker at an Amazon-like warehouse. Over the course of a week, the film tracks the patterns of her life, her cursory interactions with colleagues and flatmates, her commute, the monotonous chores which punctuate her "time off’".. mostly though, the film focuses on her wordless gestures and repetitious movements, as she goes through the rhythm of her working day at the warehouse. Underwritten by the impersonal stricture of technological control, this rhythm allows the viewers to intuit, in absence as it were, precisely what remains unspoken: Aurora’s temperament, her hopes, her yearnings. Her timid, tentative search for more meaningful human connections. Her personhood.

As a result, one reaches for old vocabularies, and talks of alienation. There is that, of course. The nature of her job is unrewarding, her labour is quantified to a de-humanising extreme, the rituals designed to mimic a sense of "community" within the workforce are farcical and insincere (as is the empty rhetoric of team-building events). On the other hand, to the extent that warehouse workers also participate in a larger economic model which replaces authentic human needs with consumption, Aurora (as Rachel Pronger and others have astutely observed) is not specifically alienated. Disassociated might be a better word here. Like everyone else, she depends on her smartphone, for both her livelihood and her entertainment. She does not appear to be neither antagonistic nor resigned to the ideological force driving her routine. She goes along, goes through the motions. Late stage capitalism, On Falling seems to suggest, does not oppress people: it virtualises them. Against this backdrop of hollowed-out routines and virtualised desires, self-emancipation is as impossible as the forming of a real collective.

This takes me to the other underlying structure: On Falling is also a treaty (cue the "on" in the title & the observational style), a point-by-point demonstration of how easy it is for one to fall off a system better designed to deal with apps than human beings. One false step, one unscripted accident, and suddenly one is left out in the cold, to face the embodied, long-repressed needs of a human existence. It is a stark scenario, though not entirely unforgiving, for it is "out" where one finally finds (in what is perhaps the closest the film gets to a hopeful nod) humanity. Spontaneous acts of kindness, camaraderie, affection, even play (an impromptu game of ball, once the IT system goes down). Moments of genuine empathy and connection, carved out of and against our shared virtualised existences. It is not class identity. It is not quite solidarity. To be frank, it ain’t much at all. But it is something.