Why make film about these people now? Why make a film about a jazz pianist, a long-deceased Swiss painter now only known by the few, a former publishing house with “a sense of mission” that time seems to have left behind?
At a time when the meaning of logos seems to be imploding at rapid speed, these figures, their actions and efforts seem to have been cast aside by history.
Yet logos isn’t falling apart for the first time, and this film will also barely make any contribution to saving it. But if we view history as a never-ending process, as something in the form of a loop that only moves infinitely slowly, our perspective on the present also shifts, each contribution to history is just infinitely small – relevance is relative. What remains at the end?
The time capsule I found myself in turned out to branch off in too many directions simultaneously and I was not up to the task I had chosen for myself.
Standing in the store rooms in Zurich, I wanted to save the traces of these people – to keep hold of everything, prevent it from disappearing by soaking it all up. But it was too much, the time capsule I found myself in turned out to branch off in too many directions simultaneously and I was not up to the task I had chosen for myself. I could feel how time, like the frozen masses of an ice age, rolled over all the books, texts, images and sounds – projects of knowledge – and turned everything to sediment.
What emerged is an attempt to narrate history from small moments, from all the other things that end up in the net (I called them “Rosebud moments”, in loose reference to CITIZEN KANE). By seeing the things I found that were important to me as self-revealing fragments, I began to put them together to form a new image. It is my attempt to grasp religion, literature, painting, music and art, all concepts so vast that they remain necessarily vague, at the point they come into focus.
René Frölke
Translation: James Lattimer
