“Silvesterchläusen” by Andrew Norman Wilson

2025 · CH/US · colour · 12’ · In competition

Silvesterchläusen is a mysterious tradition that takes place every New Year’s Eve in the most conservative region of Switzerland. Nobody knows how or why it began.

Artists’s note

While at a residency in Switzerland in 2020, my American mother received her 23andme ancestry results and coincidentally discovered that we have a significant amount of Swiss DNA. Since then I have been developing a feature film called Interlaken set in the titular town that I will shoot next spring.

Amidst research trips to Switzerland, I have discovered many surprising aspects of my heritage, the most surprising of which are the Silvesterchlause. My first encounter with them was at a wrestling festival in Interlaken. From the moment they rushed into the ring to their sudden departure, I had no idea what I was looking at. The interplay of dancing villagers with self-similar miniatures embedded in their ornate headpieces combined with the trance-inducing soundscape of yodels and bells had a hallucinatory effect on me; not simply dreamlike, rather, the aesthetics of the costumes, in all their complexity, had disorienting and illusory effects that seemed to exceed the sum of their material parts.

I asked around and was informed that Silvesterchläusen most likely has its roots in a Christmas tradition emerging from the Appenzell region at least 500 years ago, but was forced to become a New Years tradition due to moral mandates by the Reformed church. Today the tradition thrives, and is carried out by working class Protestant men in the most conservative part of the country. Still, no one can account for its meaning.

My experience of Silvesterchläusen, lacking context and exposition, attests to the power of estrangement. With my film I used zoom lenses, macro probe lenses, and high quality mics to make viewers keenly aware of the tradition’s sensory dimensions, which—due to its lack of a definitive meaning—seems to be the point.

The artist

Andrew Norman Wilson is a writer, director, and artist based in New York. His first work of video art, Workers Leaving the Googleplex, went viral upon its release and was recently exhibited in MoMA’s main collection gallery for over two years. His first narrative short, In the Air Tonight, premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to play at over 50 festivals internationally. His first magazine essay, “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now,” went viral upon its release and led to his signing with CAA.

Festival screenings include Sundance, the New York Film Festival, and Rotterdam. His work is in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Getty Museum, and The Centre Pompidou, and he has exhibited at LUMA Arles, MoMA PS1, and the Gwangju and Berlin Biennials. He has taught at UCLA, SAIC, and Cooper Union, and lectured at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Yale University. His work has been featured in Artforum, ArtReview, BOMB, Frieze, The New Yorker, and Wired, and he has published writing in Filmmaker, The Baffler, and the Paris Review.

In 2021, he was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film. His films have won awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. He has participated in the Oxbelly Director’s Lab and the Locarno Filmmakers Academy. He has served on the juries of the Palm Springs Film Festival and the Tabor Film Festival. He has directed music videos for U2, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Duck Sauce, and directed campaigns for Google and MCM.

He is currently in pre-production on a commercial film titled Interlaken, a romantic thriller set in the Swiss Alps. He is also authoring a book-length memoir based on his 2024 Baffler article “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now.”