KinoCafé am Sonntag: B wie BARTLEBY — Regie: Angela Summereder

"B wie Bartleby" draws on Herman Melville's legendary tale and transforms it into a film essay on memory, language, and resistance. Building on dialogues with a deceased companion, the famous phrase "I would prefer not to" comes alive anew in the voices and gestures of performers, youth, rap musicians, passersby, and the stranded – quietly, persistently, timeless. Angela Summereders latest film takes as its starting point Herman Melville's celebrated 1853 novella Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. Its protagonist is a law firm employee whose task consists of repetitively copying documents. Bartleby's notorious "I would prefer not to," with which—according to the lawyer narrator—he politely yet inexorably declines the assigned work with stoic indifference, runs through Summereders essayistic montage like a golden thread. | viennale 2025 With: Beatrice Frey, Maxi Blaha, Anna Mendelssohn AT 2025 | 72 min | OMD/EU