"and before I could be noticed again and taken to task, I spoke to the tiny blessed star within me, shut off my heartbeat, made my body disappear into the shadow of a bush, and continued my previous voyage without thinking about returning home ever again." -H.Hesse

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Drawing and writing are at the core of if the war continues (2012), a film with a hypnotizing sense of diagonal light and movement. The title refers to the 1917 Hermann Hesse short story, part of his collection of fairy tales, which ends:

"and before I could be noticed again and taken to task, I spoke to the tiny blessed star within me, shut off my heartbeat, made my body disappear into the shadow of a bush, and continued my previous voyage without thinking about returning home ever again."

Hesse, a passionate public enemy of the Great War, describes in the foreword of this collection of writings his belief in salvation via "the Inward Way":

"I strive to guide the reader not into the world theater with its political problems but into his innermost being, before the judgment seat of his very personal conscience."

This motto seems to directly relate to Schwartz's artistic sensibilities. His films are made of inner movement, rather than outsider interpretive assessments. In if the war continues, men and women ski jump from a three hundred and seventy-four feet high ramp, soaring throughout the gelid air of Vermont, where Schwartz lives. Jumpers move from right to left like the carriage return of a typewriter, while the landscape and rays of sunlight thrust lines in the opposite direction. The somehow nostalgic, slowed-down editing of the images contrasts with the preeminence of pounding sound, accompanied by a degraded, almost unintelligible narration from a cassette tape about the life and work of the German writer. As Schwartz points out, the soundtrack shares some similarities with Popul Vuh's electronic score at the opening of Werner Herzog's The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner (1974). This sound has the quality of a forgotten mantra or a robotic plea. The repeated motion swerves towards Nietzsche's idea of eternal return: the temptation and fascination of going back to the origins by jumping away. - Monica Saviron