Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard in Madrid.

Thomas Bernhard rarely engaged in on-camera interviews and conversations. However, he was extremely taken with the television films created by Krista Fleischmann and recognized – both confidently and with foresight – their lasting value for posterity: “I feel this portrait is an entirely successful document whose usefulness will grow.”

This portrait of the great Austrian writer combines a brilliant monologue delivered by Thomas Bernhard and the artful film work of Ferry Radax.

In this film, Austrian author Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) talks about his childhood, his youth, his life in Austria, and his coming to terms, as a writer, with all the experiences of dying – his own and those of the culture of his time.

This film reveals, under the image of the provocative, misanthropic Austrian writer whose life was peppered with scandals and altercations, a funny and cheerful character, a "ruthless anarchist".

No synopsis available yet.

The bark-beetle has invaded the big forest of the general, just as a fatal illness has into the body of its owner. The general is suffering from eye cataract, preventing him from seeing the symptoms of the trees' decline, just as he is unable to see his own rottening. His wife and the writer discuss these circumstances for two scenes, until the general discovers the fact himself in the third one. Now he is going to take appropriate action.

Heldenplatz centers on a Jewish family in the Vienna of 1988. The main character, Professor Josef Schuster, a mathematician, who can no longer stand the anti-Semitism he still finds in Austria 50 years after the Anschluss – commits suicide by jumping out of his apartment window onto the historic Heldenplatz before the play begins.