Between Myth and Machinery: A Reflection on Soap&Skin

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There is something deeply primeval and apocalyptic about Soap&Skin, the experimental film by Anja Plaschg and Ioan Gavriel. It begins with Orwell’s haunting words “Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me” and turns them into a litany, a spell. What unfolds is not a narrative in the conventional sense but a state of being. It hovers between tree and machine, surrender and resistance, myth and modernity.

The first image, a female body enclosed within the trunk of a chestnut tree, has the stillness of a pre-Raphaelite painting. It promises shelter but also reveals the discomfort of imprisonment. The tree is not merely a refuge. It is the metaphor for stasis, for a cycle that refuses to break. The figure reminds us of Artemis who turned herself into a tree to escape desire but paid for her freedom with immobility. Gavriel’s camera lingers with a kind of ritual reverence, as if we were witnessing a sacred offering.

Soon we are plunged into the industrial sublime. Colossal screws turn, metal grinds, a mining truck looms like a creature born from nightmares. The world of the machine fascinates even as it threatens. It is the dance of Moloch, progress as a force that crushes without pause. The protagonist, bound in chains, struggles against the inevitable. The choreography of her body becomes a prayer, a sacrifice under the fading light.

Plaschg’s music saturates the images with a voice that is both ethereal and painfully human. It sounds as though it rises from inside the earth. It is the lament of the tree and the song of the machine at once. There is an echo of David Bowie here, not just in the quoted lyric but in the spectral presence of the old man who peers through the hollow of the tree. He might be a ghost, a memory, or a messenger from a future that has already ended.

Soap&Skin is not concerned with answers. It dwells in the tension between rupture and safety. To break free might mean to embrace chaos, to step willingly into the jaws of the machine. When the final image threatens to consume all, we are left uncertain whether we wish for survival or annihilation.

What remains is a sensation more than a conclusion. Something has been lost and something has been released. Soap&Skin is an initiation ritual, a meditation in sound and image. The sacred chestnut and the apocalyptic truck become two aspects of the same force: that which shapes us and devours us.