The Children's Emperor & The Pianist

16-19 Jan 08 (Studio 65)

The film has also been shown at:
Different Directions film festival in Galway, Ireland, November 2009.

www.differentdirections.ie

The live performance has also been shown at the Tarumba Festival, Lisbon, Portugal 2011

http://fimfalx.blogspot.com

Preview in El Publico/(Translation)

Performance by Mischa Twitchin, with thanks to Anne Haaning;
Film edited by Britt Hatzius

The Children's Emperor
Music: Beethoven - Piano Concerto No.5, 'The Emperor'
Walter Gieseking, piano,
Grosses Rundfunk Orchester, cond. Artur Rother
(German radio broadcast, Berlin, January 23, 1945)

Text: Janusz Korczak, Wisdom for Parents (tr. T. Prount & A.H. Gorzelak)
and Ghetto Diary (tr. J. Bachrach & B. Krzywicka)

Photographs by Heinrich Hoffmann and unknown others

The Pianist
Music: Chopin - Polonaise-Fantasie, op.61, Wladislaw Szpilman, piano
(Polish Radio broadcast, 1950);
Zabczynski, Wiehler & Jurandot - Tak jak ty (Like you do)
(from the 1936 film Ada, to nie wypada [Ada, that will never do],
dir. Konrad Tom);
Szpilman – Mazurka, Wladislaw Szpilman, piano
(Swedish Radio broadcast, 1946)

Text: Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist (tr. A. Bell)

In one of his interviews with Sylvère Lotringer, Heiner Müller recalls 'the terrifying phrase' of an eleven year old Jewish boy, written in an exercise book found beside his corpse after the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto: 'I want to be a German.' This expression of the desire for life, of wishing 'to be on the other side' in the confrontation with death, offers a terrible testimony to Walter Benjamin's warning, concerning the work of historical understanding, that 'even the dead will not be safe from the enemy.' Where history is understood as belonging to this enemy – one that 'has never ceased to be victorious' - the most tragic appeal of, and for, life appears through an identification with death. In a later interview with Lotringer, Müller declares (echoing Benjamin's own thoughts on memory): 'I don't believe photography is an instrument of memory. Language is memory and images are not. Images are too abstract... You don't remember the image, you remember your reaction to it. Memory is work, it's not something you can contemplate.' The light that moves in this pair of films evokes the fragility of a present memory, in counterpoint to the power of history. Although our knowledge of the past is mediated by images, what is our knowledge of these images? Or, in the terms of a vital question posed by Georges Didi-Huberman: 'how does the production of images participate in the destruction of human beings?'

This performance film is not simply the record of a live performance, with the camera substituting for the audience. In its use of the dissolve, it offers a transposition of the live performance into the temporality of film.