We don’t know what a man is, a man does not know who he is until he has found his wound, that he has not descended into his inner darkness.
EN
“Première version. Robert Schumann's Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 47: I. Sostenuto assai - Allegro ma non troppo.
The music lingers for a minute. Cut to one of the actors, Orpheus, sitting non-centred in the frame, on a stone, on a slope. He's recounting the return from the shades, his intricate alignments with Eurydice. Then cut to Bacchante standing tall, slightly more centered. Comments on what she just heard. The orchestration of gazes and diction, familiarly Straubian. Asymptotic tension. A rapt exchange of views on love and death, nothingness, of not tearing God to pieces, etc. One segment shows him while we listen to her account. Variable framing, oscillating between closeup, half-frame, and, in the last shot, both actors in full frame. I am not staring at a single object; I am perceiving a dense dramaturgy of non-alignment and possible reconciliation, meticulous framing of bodies and gazes, with a hint to off-screen space. Blocks of time. Strata and the sounds of the natural world. A condensed piece of land, a topography of tacit marvels. .. Of the dead and the living and the shades of the impossible. And, alas, potentially it looks like something that I have never seen before.”
Martin Grennberger1
