Thomas Bernhard: 3 Days

Over the course of three days in 1970, June 5, 6, and 7, simply sitting on a white bench in a Hamburg park, Thomas Bernhard delivered a powerful monologue for Three Days ( Drei Tage ), filmmaker Ferry Radax's commanding film portrait of the great Austrian writer. Radax interwove the monologue with a variety of metaphorically resonant visual techniques--blacking out the screen to total darkness, suggestive of the closing of the observing eye; cuts to scenes of cameramen, lighting and recording equipment; extreme camera distance and extreme closeup. Bernhard had not yet written his autobiographical work Gathering Evidence , published originally in five separate volumes between 1975 and 1982, and his childhood remembrances were a revelation. This publication of Bernhard's monologue and stills from Radax's artful film allows this unique portrait of Bernhard to be savored in book form.