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Gerhard Amanshauser (photo Werner Schnelle)
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The first words, even before the first image appears. A voice whines something difficult to understand, rhymes from another world. The light goes on, Gerhard Amanshauser sits at a large microphone. This is the beginning of Travels in His Own Room, with an exposition which takes up a motif from the genre of writer portraits – the mythos of the voice and the ritual of reading – and gives it new life. The fact that Amanshauser's condition (he suffers from Parkinson's disease) plays a central role may appear to be something of a paradox. The disease distorts the meaning of what is being said, creating its own poetry. Amanshauser's singing and fantasies flow through the film, freely and without reservation. For this reason what we see and hear is not merely a portrait of a writer or his work, or a seriously ill old man, or an individual from – as he puts it himself – a Nazi family.
Travels in His Own Room is more than the sum of all these parts. On the basis of Amanshauser's biography and a few excerpts from his extensive and little-known oeuvre, a complex cabinet of curiosities relating to the man and his work is created. Scenes of awards ceremonies, readings and interviews from the past, old Super-8 material and dream-like sequences in which, for example, Amanshauser dances through his yard while wearing a top hat, are the film's aesthetic multipliers. Now and again we are nicely surprised or receive a profound insight – which enchants us immediately. Amanshauser once claimed that part of the job of literature and art is to captivate the reader. Consequently each scene and sound seems to be the product of a correspondence with Amanshauser's ideas.
(Sylvia Szely)
The renowned Salzburg poet Gerhard Amanshauser has suffered from Parkinson`s disease for 10 years. The last remants of freedom for the 78 year-old are journeys in his own room: Expeditions in the border realms between a clear mind and glowing hallucinations; through the rooms of his mysterious villa to the sites of his national socialist youth, in the distant lands to where his thoughts travel, and the hellish worlds of his nightmares. (production note)
Printgrafik: reisen_terrasse.jpg
english print version |
