Big, oak trees, green-leaved and eternal, seem to watch the girls. In the next moment the sky drizzles and the leaves have gone yellow and red, falling to the ground.
ANNA (looking at a compass that doesn’t resemble a compass so much as a small digital sundial): In Carole’s backpack.
They stop by a brook and fill their water bottles.
Beyond the brook the landscape opens up into wide plains. The girls walk through grass and wildflowers, and around their feet blood and/or other fluids drip on the flowers and the grass.
Gradually, the forest reveals increasingly vivid bodily formations to us, as if it’s sending a message to the girls or trying to mirror them. A series of trees look like twisted bodies with arms that shake their fists at the sky. A mountain crevice in the distance looks like a vagina. The girls step into it and disappear, as if we can’t follow them in there. Faint noises can be heard from deeper and deeper inside the mountain, while the edges of the crevice seem to twitch almost imperceptibly every time a noise is heard.
Out on the other side of the mountain the sound of running water can be heard. Two of the girls, TERESE and VENKE, squat next to each other, pissing. You see their butts and the piss that streams across dry dirt and flint.
VENKE (TO TERESE): How old were you when you kissed someone for the first time?
TERESE: Um … Thirteen. You?
VENKE: Twelve.
TERESE: Why?
VENKE: I was just wondering.
TERESE: What was the kiss like?
VENKE: Embarrassing.
TERESE: Same. And wet. I didn’t know people were that wet.
VENKE: I remember that I was really keen and just went for it. I remember the sound of teeth against teeth, that bone sound. I’d forgotten about teeth.
TERESE: You think about the lips and dread the tongue, but forget the teeth.
VENKE: It’s kind of like the first time you hear someone get knocked out. That whipping noise that films teach you, it doesn’t exist. Only skeleton.
TERESE: The sound of life and death.
The sound of peeing continues.
TERESE and VENKE grab each other’s hands to pull themselves up to a standing position, and move on in an autumnal landscape with fiery colours and afternoon sun blushing through the canopies. They walk up a hill, help each other carry the backpacks,
then they tumble down again, without the backpacks,
play with stuff they’ve brought with them, a bottle of water, a kerosene stove,
and perhaps something they definitely didn’t bring, a volleyball or a cabbage,
they play, faintly ecstatic,
but underneath this cheerfulness the mood is deeply euphoric in a more mystical way
they are changed by the landscape
they are part of it
they have already disappeared.
The girls take a break.
The colours change from blood-red to Norwegian green-black, that spruce green,
those trees that are always green, but with black, sort of, underneath
like that ’90s hair dye that was red, but with black underneath.
Dusk falls. VENKE and TERESE are seen sleeping in the forest; VENKE sucks on a tuft of her own hair, as if she is administering her own imaginary oxygen or nibbling on herself.
It’s completely dark. Only forest and animal sounds. Some sounds seem real, others more abstract. A spider crawls over a blade of grass, and the little legs trample the blade with a violent and metallic ring, like the sound of an electroacoustic piece of music.
The black and the white whisper in distinct tones (overdub).
The horizon is black and white.
A cosmic but crawling and creeping soundscape is heard alongside this text:
SONG: (Darkthrone, in the distance):
Over peaks and through the thickets
Through this evil murky wood
Die like a warrior, head on a tree
Slash the flesh. Needles skin deep.
SONG: (interpretation of Darkthrone, in the distance)
Over stumps and through the leaves
An evil sea of mist deceives
Hidden words on murky waves
Sink into the moor’s embrace
Lines that stretch horizon-long
Snare insanity through song
Shrouding all in fog of death
Sounds of white bone on the breath
Then it’s pitch-black and sound is all there is.
The sounds come from a tape recorder that plays large expanses of organ notes. The long veil of echo from the notes spreads across the night sky in every direction. These expansive notes are cut off abruptly, crumbling into the ticking sound of a Geiger counter, the way it ticks if it’s placed near a ceramic salt shaker dyed with uranium oxide. Then the sound gets more defined, it verges on the sound of an old- fashioned modem that is connecting to the internet, or maybe an old printer; the sound is dimmed, but in the space between the abstract and the concrete is the possibility of infinity, and through tight hollows between little machines lined up next to each other, even the smallest strange spaces insist on infinity.
Then it’s dawn, first astronomical, then civilian, and finally the common dawn.
As the forest slowly brightens around them, VENKE and TERESE, now played by the same actors all the time, are shown sleeping in formations around different natural objects, as if they have been arranged that way by the forest. The pictures resemble Valie Export’s pictures.
VENKE is seen sleeping wrapped around a spruce.
TERESE sleeps in a hollow in a clearing, her butt nestled deep down, legs and arms stretched out to either side.
VENKE is on a beach by a little pond, legs in the water.
TERESE rests on a big, round stone, belly down and legs and arms dangling on either side.
VENKE is in an oak tree, sleeping with legs and arms embracing a thick branch.
When TERESE wakes up it’s dark again, as though a whole day has passed without them waking. Only the moon lights up the sky. The forest doesn’t look like the one we last saw VENKE asleep in; now it’s a spruce forest near the timberline. TERESE looks around, calls out faintly. We don’t hear her yell for VENKE, but we hear the echoes of the calls.
VENKE isn’t far away, and we hear the echo as she yells back HI, TERESE.
TERESE and VENKE find each other, laugh. Spend a little while packing
