If and Only If (2018), based on Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola (1944), unfolds as both performance and journey, as a garden snail slowly ascends the length of a viola bow, an act that seems benign yet destabilizes the delicate balance on which the violist’s instincts depend. 

Originally commissioned in 1944 by Germain Prévost as a tribute to violinist Alphonse Onnou, Stravinsky’s Elegy is a concise, two-part polyphony of about five minutes. In Sala’s film however, its duration nearly doubles: violist Gérard Caussé adjusts tempo and phrasing to match the snail’s progress, stretching passages to accommodate its hesitant pace. The music no longer accompanies the action but arises directly from it.

Though Elegy was composed as a monologue, Sala recasts it as a duet between musician and snail. Each pause and advance compels Caussé to adapt in real time, effectively co-composing with the creature. The result is an organic, collaborative composition—a soundtrack to the snail’s “epic voyage.”

Shot in cinemascope, the work assumes the paradoxical form of a road movie, the camera following the snail’s deliberate climb as Caussé continues Stravinsky’s mournful score. At one moment, a second snail appears on the bow, a glitch-like doubling that disrupts the illusion of continuity and foregrounds the film’s constructed nature. These interruptions sharpen our awareness of both artifice and attentiveness, presence and perception.

Through this interplay of performance, image, and contingency, Sala transforms Stravinsky’s elegy into a meditation on fragility, collaboration, and mortality—an elegy not only for a departed violinist but also for the wisdom and resilience of the elderly, whose knowledge endures like the snail’s patient ascent against the pull of time.