Cinematic plea Alexander Scholz / Text in Scene: Duisburger Filmwoche as a guest of filmclub münster

Making a plea means not simply reciting a text, but placing it in a situation. Addressing it, emphasising it, making it audible – and thus also staging it to a certain extent.

The fact that a film series entitled “Text in Scene” begins with a “Plea” of all things is therefore rather fitting. Because my speech here already follows a form that stands between reading and performance – a text in performance, so to speak.

And although words like “plea” or “execution” sound like proceedings and judgement, this plea should rather be understood as an invitation – as an offer to get involved in something together. First of all, perhaps an introduction:

Let’s imagine a film showing nothing but people reading. We would see protagonists sitting quietly on a couch or at a desk, motionless, flicking through pages. You would have to look very closely – perhaps suggestively – to surmise whether reading different texts could also look different. You can’t tell whether someone is reading texts by Hermann Melville, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan or Norman Manea. The act of reading itself seems to offer little visually. One could say that a film like this represents the untranslatability of reading into film. James Benning has made this film. In READERS, he shows that reading writing and watching films are very different modes of perception – and that translations are needed between them.

The films that we will be showing here in the coming days – above all B WIE BARTLEBY by Angela Summereder – are dedicated to such translations in a way that is as virtuoso as it is reflexive. They understand readings as an active, image-generating approach to text. They seek cinematic forms not only for the content of the texts, but also for the practice of their adaptation. This is why they test reading aloud and perform text content. They reflect on the construction of reality and fiction in reading – and understand this as an act in which both the current readers and historical authors are involved.

B WIE BARTLEBY is particularly consistent in its approach because it adopts the repetitive dramaturgical form of its literary model – while constantly questioning itself as to whether the text can be staged at all. On the one hand, this is tested in various constellations and, on the other hand, constantly rejected. In performances, readings, as rap – always new, always provisional. Reading as a refusal of closure – both with texts and with loved ones.

DIE GETRÄUMTEN by Ruth Beckermann also seeks ways to establish a historical relationship to the interpersonal and literary relationship between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan in the form of a dialogue reading and rehearsal. LE BEAU DANGER by René Frölke shows how literature is staged through its operation – and almost contrasts this with Norman Manea’s texts and presence. As viewers, we have to read his texts in the film ourselves in order to sense the closeness and distance between author and text.

In very different ways, the three films are dedicated to possible stagings of texts. Can their resistive repetition, their fragile affinity, their historical abstraction be translated into the cinematic present at all? We will have the opportunity to talk about this – and about the forms with which the films encounter texts – after each film. Today with Angela Summereder, tomorrow with Prof. Kai Sina, on Wednesday with René Frölke.

As the director of a documentary film festival, I am concerned about another difference between the outward observation of readers, as in Benning’s READERS, and the films shown here. Because simply observing people reading does not raise any major questions in terms of the documentary. The films we will see in the coming days do. After all, do we still watch documentary films when texts are staged in them?

Birgit Kohler answered this question in the affirmative in 2011 and proposed the term “performing documentary” for such films – for films that “literally stage the researched documentary material on which they are based” and thereby make their own role in the production of realities visible.

B WIE BARTLEBY and the films we will see over the next few days go one step further. We will see films whose text material is no longer even documentary, but whose filmic processes can still be understood as documentary. It is not the reality securitised in texts that is staged, but the fiction and materiality of the texts that can be experienced on film in the documentary mode. The fiction of the texts does not become the fiction of the films – but becomes visible as a real, contemporary practice of reception. We see text staged through filmic reading.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Frieda Horstmann and Patrick Holzapfel in particular for putting together three films that allow us to understand these abstract ideas in concrete terms – that allow us to experience the power and presence of literature and its opening up to reading through Angela Summereder, Ruth Beckermann and René Frölke.

What we will see here over the next few days can perhaps be described not only as a series of films – but also as a series of shared readings.

Fittingly, this plea would be nothing more than a first, very preliminary attempt to stage a text. Not in response to your judgement – but to invite you. To a good reading and a good projection.

Alexander Scholz, 2026