Duration 1.51

"Musicus Fallantly introduces the first of the singers in The Falls and heralds the possibility that singing for a VUE victim is a more profitable way to identify with birds than any foolhardy attempt to fly.

Musicus stands in front of a window: the significance is repeated many times, without effort recalling an escape-route, the source of light and access to the sky and reprising its use in an earlier film Windows whose characters perished through defenestration.

Biography twelve introduces a suggestion of the body of work and the cultural background that has evolved to accommodate and support the ubiquity of the VUE, paying acknowledgement to the VUE's first heroes Icarus and da Vinci, resurrecting the historical confusions over the apocryphal folk-hero Richfeldt and intimating a need for a VUE anthem that the efforts of a succession of characters in the film will eventually supply." - Peter Greenaway, The New Social Function of Cinema, BFI, 1981

Musicus Fallantly had quickly acclimatised himself to the effects of the Violent Unknown Event. A sufferer of patagium fellitis and a speaker of Allow, he moved to Port Madoc, learnt to sing in Welsh, practiced illusionism and began a private study of linguistics he called aero-ethnography. Musicus worked on an Allow-Welsh dictionary and was instrumental in adapting da Vinci's notes on human flight as a text for the VUE Anthem. Musicus also wrote a Welch-Allow choral work celebrating 92 early flight pioneers. This work, of considerable complexity and an excess of narrative, proceeded by listing categories of flight. The main characters were divided into pilots, night-pilots, airmen, flyers, aeronauts and female aeronauts, birdmen and gullers. A 'guller' was an Allow word for those whose attempts to fly had taken place over water. Icarus had been a 'guller'. Musicus called his work "Sky-Lists" and dedicated it to Van Riquardt, the French patriot and pioneer airman who threw himself from the Eiffel Tower in 1889. Cadence, Musicus's wife, said that the film was a reconstruction, not least because the moving picture-camera wasn't invented until 1895. Van Riquardt had been a linguist and a baritone in the Lycée Nouvelle Ménilmontant.

Musicus Fallantly's eldest son Vanrick was named after Van Riquardt, but although he showed an interest in his father's illusionism, he had no interest in choral work, language or self-propelled flight. He became a sound recordist.