LE BEAU DANGER | 6 May

© Joonfilm

Text in scene – together with the Duisburger Filmwoche – Freifläche

White shadows on a black background. Black words on white. A collage of fragments. Norman Manea: Romanian writer, concentration camp survivor. Observed and accompanied. At home, travelling, imagining and teaching. Space and time for a biographical texture.

Norman Manea, born in Bukovina in 1936, was deported to a concentration camp with his family in 1941. He survived imprisonment, became a writer and emigrated from Romania to the West in 1986. Today he teaches and writes in New York. The film only provides information about these key biographical details of the author at a late stage. It allows the literature to take centre stage. It is placed in the picture: text panels with detailed excerpts from Norman Manea’s works, which have strong autobiographical references, characterise the rhythm. Observations of the writer as a public figure in the context of appearances at book fairs and seminars are added. And present-day shots of places in his life, such as a Jewish cemetery in the Ukraine. The result is a multi-layered texture of writing and speech, 16 mm film and digital material, black and white and colour, sound collages and noise – a film of fragments with vague connections, not a coherently told portrait of the artist. Instead, the focus is on the question of how memories and experiences of exile and alienation can be conveyed, in literature and in film. Le beau danger has found a free, essayistic form for this. (Berlinale Archive/ Forum 2014)