B for Bartleby

Herman Melville’s famous short story Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, published in 1853 is at the starting point of Angela Summereder’s most recent film. Melville’s protagonist is a clerk at a law firm whose job consists of repetitively copying documents. His notorious line “I would prefer not to,” with which he brushes aside the work assigned to him with a polite, relentless stoicism, as we are told by the lawyer, the first-person narrator, runs like a common thread through Summereder’s essayistic montage.
The line connects, for one, sequences from Jean-Marie Straub’s and Danièle Huillet’s History Lessons (1972) with initially image-less, voice-over dialogues between Benedikt Zulauf, who played the young man in the Brecht adaptation, and the filmmaker, who explains, that with the realization of Bartleby, she is fulfilling a long held wish of her ex-partner, who was terminally ill before the start of production. It is the “double negation” of the Bartlebyesque statement that has accompanied Zulauf throughout his life, as he confesses, and which Summereder has diverse performers practice. In their programatically repetitive speaking and singing exercises, the common thread is then spun further: by a tour guide at the Herman Melville Museum who is reenacting Hermann’s wife Elizabeth Melville; by women and men of different ages, for example, at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art and at Ikea; by two young immigrant rappers in the sound studio; and finally, by school children in a so-called “come2gether” facility and residents at VinziDorf, a Viennese homeless shelter who all interpret the text fragments assigned to them in more less improvised monologues, dialogues, or polylogues.
Inasmuch as “essay” means roughly, “rehearsal” in Spanish, the cinematic form of B for Bartleby proves to be a visual and audible reflection on the interrelation between mimetic retelling and performative appropriation of literary material, which Summereder’s interactive method updates in a way that is poetically and also politically legible. (Sabeth Buchmann)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt