Carmen Tartarotti’s and George Janett’s film from 2009 was specially selected by singer Anja Plaschg for Diagonale’19. The film is a portrait of the aclaimed Austrian writer Friederike Mayröcker (1924). To give an overview of Mayröckers massive work seems impossible and the film is also more focused on a personal portrait of the author and woman who spent many of her years with Austrian poet Ernst Jandl. Jandl died in 2000. The film is much more occupied with a portrait of Mayröcker, her thinking and her Viennesse appartment that plays an important role for her writings. Actually she has two appartments. When the first one filled up she got hold of another one.
It could be tempting for someone to charactarize Mayröcker as an odd existence but it would be very wrong. Reading just a few sentences of Mayröcker shows that she is indeed a prescent author which the film confirms. Her whole inner world seems to unfold itself in her appartment. And in the film we are witnessing her work with a lucky librarian from Stadtbibliothek Wien registrating Mayröckers writtings and storing them in folders and small metal boxes on metal shelves not far from Ernst Jandl’s which seems to be kind of unfair to one of Austrias monumental poets.
