(c)Praherfilm, courtesy of sixpackfilm
Text in scene – together with the Duisburger Filmwoche – with film plea by Alexander Scholz
The famous formula of Bartleby, “I would prefer not to”, the main character in Herman Melville’s story, is a rejection of alienated work. Based on a dialogue with her terminally ill ex-partner, whose never-realised life project was a film about Bartleby, Angela Summereder has parts of the story performed by actresses, rappers, young people and homeless people. An act of self-determined appropriation and a personal legacy that connects the historical text with the present.
Angela Summereder has thus succeeded in transforming Herman Melville’s story into an extremely lively and vibrant feature film, a film that is practically unique in its kind, in which the important presence of the text harmonises well with the images, in which the impersonal immediately becomes personal and then even takes on important political connotations and becomes more topical than ever. Marina Pavido/Cinema-Austriaco.org
“The starting point for Angela Summereder’s latest film is Herman Melville’s famous story Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street, published in 1853. Its protagonist is an employee of a law firm whose job consists of repetitively copying documents. Bartleby’s notorious “I would prefer not to”, with which, according to the lawyer, the first-person narrator, he brushes off the work assigned to him with polite, implacable stoicism, runs through Summereder’s essayistic montage like a common thread:
On the one hand, this combines sequences from Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s History Lessons (1972) with initially imageless voice-over dialogue between Benedikt Zulauf, who played the young man in the Brecht adaptation, and the filmmaker, who, as she explains, is fulfilling a long-held wish of her ex-partner, who was terminally ill before the start of production, by realising Bartleby. It is the “double negation” of Bartleby’s formula, which, as Benedikt Zulauf confesses, accompanied him throughout his life and which the Austrian director has various performers try out.
The common thread is then spun further in their programmatically repetitive speaking and singing exercises: From a tour guide in the Herman Melville Museum, who reenacts his wife Elizabeth Melville, to women and men of different ages, for example in the Vienna Folklore Museum and at Ikea, from two young migrant rappers in the recording studio, finally from pupils in an institution called “come2gether” and from residents of the VinziDorf, a Viennese homeless shelter: they all interpret the text fragments assigned to them in more or less improvised monologues, slides or polylogues.
Inasmuch as “essay” means “rehearsal” in Spanish, the filmic form of B for Bartleby proves to be a visible and audible reflection on the interrelationship between mimetic retelling and performative appropriation of a literary material, which Summereder’s interactive method actualises in a way that is both poetically and politically legible.” Sabeth Buchmann/Sixpackfilm
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