I AM VON HÖFLER |
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How does the process of film-making—like weaving a carpet, a of a 250 years saga of the Hungarian von Höfler family—render the chosen subject topical, re-liveable? And what is the topical signifier, is it merely a fleeting (a momentary) décollage — which is neither a piece of news, nor official history? And what does the glance at (the films, stories) from the past of my protagonist, the young Tibor Höfler projected into his future (our present), offers to find, by such puritan means, about the vortex called time?
The twists of a long life, the elegy of the last member of the great Pécs leather manufacturers. Recently researchers claim that Goethe modelled his famous Werther figure after an ancestor of Tibor Höfler: our film journey presents itself in time and space with this double twist. Not only Goethe's hero Werther is different from the real 18th-century Jakob von Höfler, but thus the threads of the Höfler saga intertwine in a double spiral of fate within the 20th century Central Europe's turmoil. The real and invisible images of the melancholic hero, Werther — a literary fate — cross cut with the real life protagonist von Höfler's life, his love, his family, his fate.
VIDEO INTRO from I AM VON HÖFLER - Variation on Werther
credits director • Péter Forgács supported by Awards |
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