“Only non-music makes music out of music”, one hears early on in this film.

What Paulus Böhmer, the Frankfurt poet who died in 2018, meant by this is clear: Without silence, noise, discord or even simple speech for my part, we would not know how to recognize music as such, let alone appreciate it.

Art in general needs the profane.

But sometimes a different art as well.

Andreas Platthaus

Editor in charge of literature and literary life.

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Tomorrow evening in the cinema of the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, a film will premiere that tells of poetry differently than it does itself. And also of music, but as if under hand, namely only on the soundtrack. It is called "Islands of Darkness, Islands of Light - The Poet Paulus Böhmer" and should have been shown last year as part of the Festival of Lights. But then came the first lockdown, and when the festival wanted to make its entire offer accessible via streaming, the director Gunter Deller refused: his film should be in the cinema.

No wonder, since Deller is himself a co-operator of one of these, the “Mal seh'n” in Frankfurt's north end. But the fifty-eight year old is actually a film artist, with the emphasis on the second half of the word. Numerous experimental short films have been made since 1989, and one of them should also be made about Paulus Böhmer. Then the poet died while he was still in production, and in view of his material, which had suddenly assumed the character of a legacy, Deller decided to give the work a completely different structure. This is how his first feature-length film came about: 102 minutes, each beginning and ending with an experimental combination of text, images and music. In the hour in between, the life and work of Böhmer are portrayed,with classic means of documentary film such as interview recordings with Böhmer himself, posthumous interviews with contemporary witnesses, archive recordings and

found footage

.

He is considered manic

The willingness of Boehmer's widow Lydia to open up her husband's estate and himself in conversation with Deller makes the image of the manic poet even more fascinating because of his long poems - the twenty-one-part cycle “Kaddisch” comprises around seven hundred pages . The documentation derives the tectonic structure of Böhmer's poetry from his life, including the fascination for the connection between the gruesome and the ostracized, specifically the Shoah and sex. In long shots of Böhmer's bookshelves, the back of a book by Boris Lurie can be seen again and again: the controversial artist who shocked like no other with the sexualization of the Holocaust (FAZ, July 28).But there are many more inspirations in the collections of material and ideas that Böhmer called “Sudelbücher”, and in his love for reducing newspaper articles to just a few cut-out sentences, this poet's love for accumulation, wealth and challenge at the same time is evident his poetry represents.

Deller consequently varies this principle for his introduction and discharge. The water is the most important motif: in its constant movement and incomprehensibility. Through the metamorphosis of fauna and flora, Deller also creates a sequence that looks like a viewer's eye on the canvas, and once in it the face of Paulus Böhmer flashes. Above all of this lies the poet's dark recitation voice with the flick of his tongue from Upper Hesse, and underneath all of this, the music of the composer and Bohemian friend Alfred 23 Harth, to whom Deller also owes early film recordings, creates an additional level of eclecticism, the lyrical process in the principle of quotation and alienation Boehmers is related.

At the end you can hear Böhmer reading aloud: “How long should one remember? / Always. Always? Always! ”Deller's poetry documentary fulfills this claim for Paulus Böhmer. He creates a resonance space for its language without providing mere echoes of the lyrical process. It is further optical poetry that Deller uses to frame a portrait that is much more than a filmed party note: it brings poetry to life.