Volume 2,Issue 3
Vegetal Witnessing and Historical Narrative in Silent Friend
A century passes through the botanical garden in Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend (2025), but no character remembers all three periods. The ginkgo seems to provide that missing continuity. Yet its position as a witness depends on the film, not on evidence that a tree can recall human events. Reading the stories of Grete, Hannes, and Professor Wong alongside the garden’s changing rules and the film’s contrasting photographic formats, this essay examines how historical connections are made without a shared human narrator. Ricoeur’s account of testimony, work on cultural memory, and Marder’s thinking about vegetal life help distinguish persistence from remembrance. The argument is that Enyedi gives the ginkgo a place in historical narration while withholding the voice and knowledge a conventional witness would possess. Its silence changes how the human stories are viewed; it does not resolve what plant experience is.
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[3] Ricoeur P, 2004, Memory, History, Forgetting (K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
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[8] Le Cinéma Club, 2026, May 14, Q&A with Ildikó Enyedi [Interview], visited on May 14, 2026, https://www.lecinemaclub.com/journal/qa-with-ildiko-enyedi/
[9] Marder M, 2013, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press.
[10] Erll A, 2011, Memory in Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, visited on January 16, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321670
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