Taking its cue from Rilke’s poetic address to a silent friend, Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend renders the alien simply as something I would call a serene abundance. Through the careful focus of early cameras and the data translations of modern sensors, the titular ginkgo tree holds an absolute, quiet reality that is made visible to the audience when the cinematic frame finally pulls back.

Da stieg ein Baum. – “A tree arose” (Rilke, 1923/2004, p. 10).

Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus opens with the above line. The tree is called into being out of nothing as a construct of language (Gosetti-Ferencei, 2019). Planted in 1832 at the botanical garden in Marburg, the ginkgo tree enters the film already framed in three narratives that leap over a century.

Silent Friend’s 1908 segment had Grete learn to bring things into focus on plants that are already dead specimens. As the first woman student at Marburg University, she was excluded by patriarchal academia and turned to photography as her way of seeing. Contrasting with the blurry background, a leaf in sharp focus enters the lens; her own piece of the world is picked out when she turns the focus. We, as audiences, look at the focused frame of flower fragments and root specimens just as Grete did, a series of objects that seemingly no longer speak to us.

German cultural critic Walter Benjamin developed the concept of the optical unconscious; the camera is able to reach a layer undiscerned. “For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye” (1931/1999, p. 510). Benjamin’s notion of the other nature is a space informed by the unconscious rather than human consciousness. Cameras have their own perception conditions; slow motion or enlargement both bring into view what is unavailable to the human eye. However, are we closer in connection to the plant itself, with more detail accessible? What comes into focus is within the camera’s grammatical structure, whereas the reality of the plant lies elsewhere outside of scope. Grete’s encounters with the botanical world are mediated by this technological “other nature”. Decades later, the same framing deals with a living tree.

In the 2020 segment, neuroscientist Tony wraps the biosensors around the ginkgo tree in Marburg. We may read the wrapping as an alternative frame that renders a data-tree. The act of framing remains the same across time; it is the subject that alters from an inactive specimen to a growing tree. Film critic David Katz from Cineuropa reads the film as failing to create a mutual understanding in an apposition: “an attempted conversation between two people with no language in common” (Katz, 2025). Such an exchange between the tree and the human is precisely what the film serenely presents – every contact is an attempt to frame a part of infinite encounters. Tony looks at the tree through a window beaded with rain, with the glass, water, and the tree’s silhouette layered onto one plane. Without an unmediated channel, what reaches him is always through an exterior. Acknowledging the limitations of framing enlightens us where the alien lies – it is perfectly reasonable that we might see the alien as the tree grows beyond the frames, and the abundance of nature makes no single frame able to capture to its fullest. 

Sometimes the biosensors’ reading stays flat, and maybe the tree simply is not obliged to respond to us. It was never in the grammar of reply at all. The cinematography suggests that “even the fullest of human lives is a minor blip” (Chang, 2026), where the sheer scale of the tree peacefully dwarfs the human in comparison. I found the scene of Tony’s face and the canopy double-exposed most interesting since they are almost merged together as if they were one. The communion-like is done through the illusion of superimposition, a film trick that self-reveals itself when two or more images are layered upon each other. The rare honesty confesses that framing is simply framing; there is no fusion over the boundaries. It shows itself instead of pretending to be a clean window. Whether Grete’s camera or Tony’s sensors, or even the film entirely, all hand the tree to the audience partially. 

Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen – “Silent friend of the many distances” (Rilke, 1923/2004, p. 65).

Sonnets to Orpheus’s last poem opens with the above line, and the ginkgo tree is now golden in full bloom. In the final time-lapse pull-back shot, we finally see the full picture of the tree as night falls. The distances (die Fernen) are what friendship is made of. Across these gaps, the film addresses the navigable alien for 145 minutes. In multiple reaches, such a distance exists in plural (vielen) instead of one trench. Every apparatus we see is a Ferne, a reaching towards the ginkgo tree that only exists on the basis of such removal. The pull-back shot itself reinforces the gap where the cinematography physically draws back as the light retreats. It is precisely at the last shot die Fernen ceases its function as a metaphor. The last distance is the darkness itself, engulfing the tree branch by branch until the screen gives it up completely. Looking back to the film’s opening shot, we see a time-lapse of the seed sprouting out of its pod, and thus a digital readout. It wraps up just as the film uncloaks itself. The ginkgo tree conveyed thoroughly for almost two centuries was handed to us fully at the moment the dark takes it back. 

The ginkgo tree never answered because it was never addressed in a language that expects answers. It stood still, framed and golden, and then gone, as fully and as partially given as anything we reach for across distance.