a hook but no fish explores the lingua ignota (unknown language) received by the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The film begins at Disibodenberg in Germany, the site of the monastery where the child Von Bingen was given as a tithe and interned with two other women. The film moves from Hildegard’s place of internment, where she first began to write, to the desktop of an unknown narrator, to the living room of a flat, to a farmhouse, to scenes of birds swarming and roaming through streets in London and Rotterdam. This vertiginous time-travel is accompanied by a score composed by Aotearoa musician Frances Duncan. a hook but no fish speculates whether the lingua ignota is a prophetic language for an arid time such as our own, where rivers run dry, mammals no longer exist, and only technology and tools survive, and asks what Von Bingen’s act of renaming things with a green-sampling word might bring about.
