Can one adapt Herman Melville‘s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street for the big screen? And if so, how? Austrian writer-director Angela Summereder’s new film, B for Bartleby, uses the famous short story as an inspiration for a broader cinematic reflection.
The film explores “the impossibility of translating written language into images and sounds,” notes a synopsis on the website of Austria’s Viennale, where the movie screens this week after its world premiere at Doclisboa over the weekend. “Melville-themed tours at the author’s property, actors impersonating a fictional Bartleby and performers rehearsing the text make up Angela Summereder’s catalogue of ‘adaptation’ styles, with the purpose of carrying out her late partner’s wishes – Benedikt Zulauf, who acted in Straub-Huillet’s Geschichtsunterricht (1972), worked as a librarian and long dreamed of making a film out of the story.”
Adds the synopsis: “As we witness the couple’s discussions about the project, we become involved in Summereder’s struggles and hesitations, a rare trait in the often solemn genre of the essay film, that offers a welcome injection of emotion into an approach otherwise predominantly textual.”
As such, the film is also a celebration of cinema and literature as a means to engage with others and the world at large.
Check out a trailer for B for Bartleby, for which sixpackfilm is handling international sales, here.
How did Summereder find her approach to the film, which mixes various approaches? “It actually came about out of necessity because it was clear to me that I didn’t want to make a classic film adaptation of a literary work, or that I couldn’t,” she told THR in an interview. “It’s a really complex, difficult story, so the bar is set pretty high.”
Her ex-partner Zulauf asked her twice to collaborate on a Bartleby film. The first time was when they met, but they didn’t end up working on it. The second time was “many, many, many years later, after parenthood and separation, when Benedikt had cancer and he asked me, like in a déjà vu: ‘Do we want to make a Bartleby film now?’” she recalled. “But we just we not on the same page, our ideas about making a feature film are very far apart.” When he died, nothing happened for two years.
“Then, while I was cleaning up, I came across tapes I had recorded of our conversations about our ideas for the film,” Summereder told THR. Certain parts of these conversations can also be heard in the film. “Listening to them was really interesting, and you can tell how complicated the film discussions were, but there was also his sense of urgency, which really touched me. And I thought you could make a film about the attempt to make a film about the Bartleby story and the challenges, and the various approaches. So, in that sense, it also became a film about filmmaking and failure.”
Listening to the tapes in the film may remind the audience of Bartleby’s famous catchphrase, “I would rather not,” which he uses to decline every request he receives from his employer, who is the narrator of the story.
What is different from the story is that Summereder’s film features women. “When you read it, you notice that it is set in an all-male sphere,” she explained. “There is no woman. None of the male characters have or mention girlfriends, wives, or sisters. But when I was looking at Melville’s biography, I noticed that he surrounded himself with women in his private life. He was married and had daughters. So, he lived in a very feminine world, and the women allowed him to focus on his writing and also copied his pages.”
Angela Summereder
Among other women featured in B for Bartleby is a trio that moves and speaks theatrically. “They are like mediators with their spoken performances, while men sit and write in their own quiet sphere” in the film, the director explained. “It was important to me that the women act as a collective and the men as individuals, or as lone fighters.”
Children reading and discussing Bartleby add another dimension to the movie that was important to its creator. “In the original story, there is a 12-year-old apprentice,” she emphasizes. So, she went to a youth center and asked if they were interested in a collaboration. “One of the nice things when you find yourself making a film is to dive into different social and age groups and areas and work together,” Summereder tells THR. “I love this real exchange rather than arriving with film trucks, setting up, filming, and then disappearing.
In the youth center, she also met rappers who feature in the film as they try to develop beats and lyrics for a Bartleby rap. “Luckily, our camerawoman [Antonia de la Luz Kašik] had the presence of mind to film this gift of the goddess of documentary filmmaking,” Summereder said with a smile.
All in all, B for Bartleby feels more like a cinematic and performance experience than simply a film. And that is by design. “I started making film as a young woman and didn’t want to bring a certain claimed reality to the screen, but make it more about emotion and invite the audience so they feel included.”
‘B for Bartleby’
Courtesy of Viennale
Summereder’s next film project will continue her approach and focus. “It will again be a hybrid film and be about motherhood and climate,” she said. “And again, it’s connected to a literary text, in this case, the Percival epos. In it, there are two female characters that interest me – one is Percival’s mother, Herzeloyde, and the other is Cundrie, the sorceress.”
