Breath Crystal (Atemkristall)

The jewish poet Paul Celan was born in Roumenia from German speaking
parents. Their death in a concentrationcamp during the holocaust
effected his poetry strongly. In a lifelong struggle to uncover the
unspeakable, Celan tried to create within his poetry a metaphoric
landscape of ice and snow, that would bear witness to the suffering
during the Holocaust.

The film is a visualization of the poem "Weggebeizt" (Etched away) by
Paul Celan on a beautiful glacier in Switzerland. In Breathcrystal
the various layers of meaning are incorporated into film language,
interrelating the imagery and sound of the poem with the stunning
landscape, dance, music and visual arts. The poem was recorded for
radio broadcasting by Paul Celan himself and his voice reciting the
poem is incorporated into a filmscore composed by the Dutch composer
Harry de Wit.

Visual arts
The glass art of Jelena Popadic combines various images etched in
glass, glass objects and a large glass installation. The glacier is
transformed into a theatrical environment: a stage, a mourning site
and a place of purification and com-memoration.

The dance
The ice surface provides a stage for the dancer. The dancer (the man
in black) travels up the glacier to finally find "breathcrystal"
(symbolic of bearing witness)in the deep crevasse "of time". His
quest is spiritual, climbing the glacier has a ritual quality.
Michael Schumacher travels past various sites. The strenght of the
imagery lies in its undercooled quality, intermingling the strong
emotional impact of Celan's poetry with the dynamics of the dance
and the spectacular ice landscape. At the end the man reverses his
path and travels downward carrying "breathcrystal" into the world of
the living.

The music
The musical score combines the natural sounds of the glacier, the
breath of the dancer with an instrumental score, featuring a
clarinet and various percussion instruments combined with a digital
soundmix. The sound of ten men reciting the Hebrew prayer for the
dead; the kaddish, accompagnies part of the dancer's quest.

The makers have tried to create, using film language, the
"unumstösliches Zeugnis" (to use Celan's term) that allows the
audience to journey into the past and re-emerge in the present to
commemorate and to honour the dead, moving from dark to light, from
ice to water, from black to white, from death to the renewal of
life; from mourning to resurrection.

director: Ruth Meyer
produced by Scarabee Films bv
 
  Co-2000

images from the movie