Sag es mir Dienstag

In July 1920, Franz Kafka spent four days in Vienna, where he joined Milena Jesenská. While much is known of their passionate, impossible relationship through Kakfa’s Letters to Milena and Diary, these four days remain secret. It is the spaces between the letters that Astrid Ofner is trying to fill in by associating extracts from Kafka’s correspondence with Super-8 images shot by amateurs in Vienna or by herself. The trembling images of the city and its surroundings–stretches of water and their banks, streets, trains, picnics in a park, either in faded, misty colours or black and ethereal white, as if a sudden excess of light was burning the image–, rather than following the imaginary footsteps of Kafka and Milena in Vienna, retrace, in a melancholy tone and twilight shades, the movement of a love that renounces itself the very moment it is declared, the wavering and anguish-ridden peace, and the deceptive dwindling of night that devours dawn. “Writing letters is like getting undressed in front of ghosts; they await this moment avidly. Written kisses do not arrive at their destination, the ghosts drink them down on the way,” wrote Kafka to Milena. What Astrid Ofner films is the leftovers of this ghosts’ banquet. (Yann Lardeau)