Michel Houellebecq
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Poet, essayist, novelist and filmmaker, Michel Houellebecq has always had close ties with the cinema and the world of the visual arts, which have accompanied and extended his reflexions since the start of his career, as the frequent allusions to them in his novels attest. This…
Cast
On the first day of shooting, James Franco, David Shields, and Caleb Powell throw out the script when a real-life argument breaks out between the three of them about what can and can't be used in the film. Shields and Franco browbeat Powell to sacrifice everything for the sake of the film; Powell threatens to leave; Shields feels guilty about betraying Powell; and Franco wants Shields and Powell to confess all for the sake of the film. A debate, nearly to the death, about life and art.
The documentary is titled after Arkadaş Z. Özger’s poem “Hello My Dear” which had caused much controversy in the period it was first published. Considered to be in defiance of heteronormativity, the said poem includes references to the poet’s personality, his family, his relationship to the society, and his “unexpected” death, which came three years after its publication. Today, 50 years after it was written, the documentary follows these same lines in the poem utilising cinematic elements. The documentary also rediscovers the poetics; reaches out to the family, the comrades, the friendships, departing from the official historical accounts, cognizant of his experience of otherness, in pursuit of the “lost” portrait of Arkadaş Z. Özger.
An installation film that consists of a six-hour-long monologue performed by Edith Clever, who reads texts by Syberberg and many different authors, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Plato, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Mörike, Richard Wagner, William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, and Chief Seattle.
