Bawke - POV - Aarhus Universitet

46 p.o.v. number 21 March 2006
apartment, the old Greta has reached the hall, and before being lifted
out through the door, she turns her head, looks up the stairs and
smiles when the sounds of the couple making love are blended with
the climax of the music. At the very climax, shot from above, the
director pans away from the two lovers and focuses on a close-up of
Greta’s face, still looking upwards yet without the satisfied smile seen
in the earlier cut, but hopefully resting and more serene than when we
first met her on the fifth floor, thanks to the releasing powers of her
positive memories. Probably also with the recognition, and the regret,
that this was the last time for her to caress the banister. The
downwards movement has come to an end, the main door is opened
by the ambulance men instead of Greta, and where the young woman
stepped in through the door full of light and passion, the old one is
carried out in the same sharp white light that the young Greta and her
lover had appeared in near the start of the film.
The magic of the film comes from letting the spiral movement
encompass both the composition and the theme. The upward move-
ment and the downward movement are like a sea-shell in which the
two directions are intimately connected; they are actually one. The
spiral’s way up is the same as its way down, the one leads to the other.
The concrete moving up the staircase for the young Greta and the
downward movement for the old Greta, are also symbolic movements,
into life and out of life. Two moments of her life are brought together
by the generosity and the power of her memories. The fact that these
memories are triggered by the mentioning of her name only
underlines the spiral figure as the dominant artifice of Staircase: life
and death, the architecture of the staircase, the anatomy of the ear
(connected to her hearing her name, the trigger of the story), the
composition of the film – it is all one coherent movement.