Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter / The goalie's anxiety at the penalty kick, 2006
The title is taken from the novel of Peter Handke, who just won the most important literary price for literature wirtten in German language. But this price has put him currently onto front pages of international newspapers since the award had been immediately withheld. He is accused of having been too much a favorite of Serbia andSlovodan Miloshevich during the war time something that he disputes though he attended his funeral.
(I myself do not have enough insight into this particular affair and leave the reading of this video open to anybody)
The story is about an alienated man, a former well known goalie who just has lost his job and meanders alienated through Vienna and a small Austrian border village. His flaneurisim makes him encounter random people, random love and random violence of all sorts admidst meditations on the ineviitable but dispossesing proximity and distance of things and names of things. (not to mention prices of things and more) Asked by a woman with whom he had a one night stand whether he is working today, his answer consissts of strangling her to death - as if by accident, unaware and unmeditated. This is not the only unnatural death though the book doesn't belong to the genre of murder novels.
This video is part of a series of "kick readings" I initiated with several books by Sigmund Freud in 2001. This particular piece has been not only inspired by the current Fussballweltmeisterschaft (world champioinship) in Germany but also by a certain infamous Austrian/German tradition of destroying books in the first part of the 20th century.
Bregenz, Austria, June 2006
dvd. 7 min, 2006
video excerpt 4 min, streaming
video stills
---
result:
video excerpt 4 min, streaming