Tell me on Tuesday

"Tell me on Tuesday", wrote Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenská. He planned to visit her on Tuesday, stopping in Vienna on the way to Prague. "It would be most sensible to tell you today where I would like to wait for you, but I would suffocate till we met.... Is there in the world, Milena, as much patience as is necessary for me? Tell me on Tuesday."
Kafka´s longing to see Milena again, before he was able to spend four days with her in Vienna, was marked by delay, and a transition to written form in letters and diary entries. A trembling before and an drained after frame those days in July, 1920, the particulars of which remain a blank.
Astrid Ofner matched Kafka´s love letters to Milena with fragile images that permit the existence of that blank space, making it visible rather than filling it in.
A filmic search begins at Vienna´s edge. Gentle waves break on the Danube´s bank at Kritzendorf. Rocks, water, clouds - "above it all, a premonition of Vienna." Ofner used a Super-8 handheld camera to film in muddled colors, in grainy black and white, in lonely tracking shots moving through the city. Sylvie Rohrer reads Kafka´s notes in a voice over, anchoring his texts in the flow of images with a gentle voice, while von Webern´s music creates carefully floating worlds of sound. The lights of the Giant Ferris Wheel flicker in the pitch-black night behind utility poles, anonymous traffic circles in the dark. Bridges span the Danube, gray in the morning´s light, subways leave the cold and clammy station.
While transience is inscribed in the film material, Astrid Ofner´s gaze resists all sentimentality. Instead, a sense of timelessness is created, which fills itself with remembrance of the past. A rare view of Vienna.

(Alexandra Seibel)

Translation: Steve Wilder


In early July 1920, Franz Kafka spent four days in Vienna, passing most of his time with Milena Jesenskà. What happened before and after is documented in a series of letters and diary entries, but the days themselves remain Kafka’s and Milena’s secret: a secret for which filmmaker Astrid Ofner has composed a succession of concrete and freely associated images and movements.

(Viennale International Film Festival)