Travels in his own room

The first words, even before the first image appears. A voice whines something difficult to understand, rhymes from another world. The light goes on, Gerhard Amanshauser sits at a large microphone. This is the beginning of Travels in His Own Room, with an exposition which takes up a motive from the genre of writer portraits - the mythos of the voice and the ritual of reading - and gives it new life. The fact that Amanshauser's condition (he suffers from Parkinson's disease) plays a central role may appear to be something of a paradox. The disease distorts the meaning of what is being said, creating its own poetry. Amanshauser's singing and fantasies flow through the film, freely and without reservation. For this reason what we see and hear is not merely a portrait of a writer or his work, of a seriously ill old man, or an individual from - as he puts it himself - a Nazi family. … Travels in His Own Room is more than the sum of all these parts. On the basis of Amanshauser's biography and a few excerpts from his extensive and little-known oeuvre, a complex cabinet of curiosities relating to the man and his work is created. Scenes of awards ceremonies, readings and interviews from the past, old Super-8 material and dream-like sequences in which, for example, Amanshauser dances through his yard while wearing a top hat, are the film's aesthetic multipliers. Now and again we are nicely surprised or receive a profound insight - which enchants us immediately. Amanshauser once claimed that part of the job of literature and art is to captivate the reader. Consequently each scene and sound seems to be the product of a correspondence with Amanshauser's ideas.