Not with you, but neither without you. They could have been a perfect couple, these two sensitive and important lyricists of the post-war era: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. But in spite of their affection, they weren’t a dream couple, because the words that they used to write their stories were always taken very seriously, and time and again got in the way. A back and forth which lasted over many decades, which was agonizing but also full of devotion, and which fought for love and solidarity but in the end only led them back to loneliness.
A complex relationship which the renowned Austrian documentary and essay filmmaker Ruth Beckermann reproduces with the musician Anja Plaschg and the actor Laurence Rupp in this new multi-award winning work. They read from the correspondence between Bachmann and Celan (1948-67). During the breaks, they sometimes reflect on what they’ve read, sometimes they just smoke a cigarette – inside of them and with them, the two poets’ souls, lost to each other, are present. Two couples – one in the past, one in the present – stand in relation to each other within the same space. A simultaneously visible and invisible film, in which the dreamers evoke the dreamed.
