The Fall

The Fall may be brief, but it turns out to have at least five heavyweight inspirations – the most flippant of which is a snap of Eric and Donald Trump Jr on a big-game hunting jaunt. “The day I saw a picture of the Trump sons grinning with a dead leopard,” he says, was the day he came up with a shot of the mob posing for a selfie with their prey.

It’s a moment that hauls a story, whose bare bones recall Reconstruction-era America and even stone-age justice, firmly into the present. The masks mix early man and modern social protest – half Neanderthal, half Vendetta.

“I think fear is ever-present,” says Glazer when asked if a lynch-mob mentality is currently being given freer rein. “And that drives people to irrational behaviour. A mob encourages an abdication of personal responsibility. The rise of National Socialism in Germany for instance was like a fever that took hold of people. We can see that happening again.” Advertisement

Aside from The Fall, the feature-length film Glazer has been working on for the past six years is a Holocaust drama set in Auschwitz, apparently based on Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest, about a Nazi officer who becomes infatuated with the camp commander’s wife. That film, due to shoot next spring, is “very much its own thing,” he says. Yet he has spoken about his fascination with photos of Germans thrilled by the horrors they were witnessing – something seemingly explored in The Fall.

Another starting point for the short, he says, was a Bertolt Brecht poem written in exile in the 1930s: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.” These lines, says Glazer, were inscribed on the inside cover of a collection of essays given to him by a friend.

Other inspirations include the Goya self-portrait The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, in which the napping artist is plagued by flapping bats, generally interpreted as a critique of Spanish society as ignorant, insane and corrupt. “Also,” says Glazer, “his Disasters of War etchings, urgently titled I Saw It or This Is Worse. Hell on earth, witnessed like a photojournalist such as Robert Capa or Don McCullin. Ferocious, factual, unflinching.”