A Translation of "Der Kulterer," a Screenplay from 1973 by Thomas Bernhard

“He was the same as everybody else in all his actions; but there was an appalling void within him; he no longer felt any worries, any desires; he viewed his own existence as a necessary burden…”

Büchner, "Lenz"

Kulterer

A FILM

We hear the regular, precisely spaced footfalls of the guards on the square flagstones on the bank of the dried-up riverbed, as the two guards patrolling the outer wall of the penal institution move steadily away from each other; meanwhile we first indistinctly and then gradually ever-more distinctly see the wall of the penal institution and on that wall we see at three-second intervals and for no longer than a second each time the title KULTERER; the title appears on the wall IN CAPITAL LETTERS, and is visible first in the upper-left corner of the screen, then in the upper-right one, then in the lower-right one.  Little by little the wall becomes recognizable as a wall, from which the camera now retreats with great rapidity.  The camera is positioned directly facing the wall, so that it begins by showing a piece of it no larger than a square meter, and it pulls back all the way to the far side of the riverbed, from which spot the penal institution in its entirety can be seen.  The camera is now completely stationary; between the two of them the patrol-guards have compassed all but the last third of the perimeter of the institution; once they have completed the circuit, there is a switch to a view of the ground beneath the camera, and from there the view proceeds slowly along the ground towards and past the riverbed in a straight line, until it pans upward to face Cell 38, in which Kulterer is incarcerated; the windows of the cells along the outer wall of the institute and the numbers under the windows are all clearly visible; through the open cell windows we suddenly hear some institutional crockery breaking and some shouting.  Then silence.  The actor doing the narration, who is also the actor playing Kulterer, says, “The closer he drew to the day of his release from the penal institution, the more Kulterer dreaded returning to his wife.”  The camera suddenly cuts to the left-side patrol guard, who is looking up at Kulterer’s cell, then to the right-side patrol guard, who is looking up at Kulterer’s cell, then to a view from above of both guards, who now turn around and head back towards the lookout tower, which is sited at the midpoint of their circuit.  The camera now looks down from the roof of the institution at the guard on the right; the junior baker is coming around the corner on a bicycle with a bag full of rolls; the guard stops him, and, after a brief exchange of words that we do not hear, points him back in the direction from which he came; the baker gets back on the bicycle and rides off.  The guard resumes patrolling.  Now voices and the clatter of crockery can be heard from the open windows as the camera motionlessly and all the while from high above them films the two guards approaching each other; suddenly it is directed at a boy dressed in black who is blowing a train conductor’s whistle; he gazes over at the hills, then blows again and gazes over at the penal institution and starts running, the whole time he is running along the dam spanning the riverbed; he runs for at least seven or eight seconds, then stops and blows another short blast on the whistle.  His large, puffy face.  The face of Kulterer, who is gazing out the window of his cell.  The inmates are eating their breakfast.  As though his three fellow inmates had asked him something earlier, Kulterer pensively says: yes, yes.  After he has eaten a bit of bread, he says: yes, yes, I know.  The camera shows the three inmates as they eat, shows Kulterer, as the narrator says, “But he really never spoke unless he had just been asked a question, and he would immediately stand to attention upon the appearance of the warden, which was at first merely intimated by the clattering of his truncheon, which seemed to echo through the corridors, then by his booted footfalls, which grew ever louder and more portentous and finally overpowered the sound of the printing-machines.”  At first the images on camera are not at all distinct or obviously correspondent to the state of affairs being commented on; then, after the narrator has said “intimated,” everything finally becomes distinctly visible and recognizable.  Kulterer is standing at a printing machine and counting forms, the camera shows a completely apathetic Kulterer who is performing mechanical movements that are the mechanical movements of the printing machine, as though Kulterer were a part of the printing machine; the camera is stationary; the narrator says, “The warden was very well-disposed towards Kulterer—who had to count, pack, and cord up the forms as they fell out of the printing machine—because in contrast to the other inmates he was a quiescent individual who, it seemed, had no aspirations of any kind and strictly followed all rules and instructions and was even in actual fact quite satisfied with everybody, apart from himself.”  As the narrator is saying the word “himself,” the camera cuts to Kulterer’s face, which is looking into the face of the warden, who is suddenly standing next to him; Kulterer is looking up at the warden; his manner of looking up at the warden makes it plain that the warden is standing next to him even though the warden cannot be seen.  Kulterer: a letter and a package?  Warden, whose mouth is shown: Not only a package, but also a letter.  Kulterer rests his hands on his thighs and says, “Yes, yes, I know, Mr. Warden!”  “All right!” says the warden, whose mouth alone is being shown.  Kulterer, of whom one is now likewise being shown only the mouth: a letter!  The warden’s mouth: all right!  The camera shows the warden from the mouth downwards then pans down to the floor and up Kulterer’s body as far as his mouth; once the camera has reached his mouth, Kulterer says: yes, yes, I know.  The printing machines are now all making a great deal of noise; the camera shows the head of the warden, who is now gazing over and beyond Kulterer’s head into the spacious print shop, in which there are inmates stationed at all the machines, inmates who are performing the same movements as Kulterer; here everything is automated and quickly attains a deafening volume.  The warden passes by one man after another, inspecting the work as he goes.  Suddenly the machines shut down with a jolt; the warden has drawn to a halt; he asks: who has been assigned latrine duty?  Three inmates at the back of the room raise their hands.  The warden notes the identities of the men and strikes himself on the right calf with his truncheon, as he has fallen into the habit of doing.  Then he looks over the entire print shop one more time and exits.  The rattling and stamping of the printing machines are once again deafening, the movements of the inmates once again mechanical.  The camera cuts to the face of Kulterer, who is eating his breakfast.  Narrator: “He led an existence that was completely withdrawn and completely unheeded by his fellow-inmates, and during his free time, which was often much too long, because in accordance with regulations they worked only five or six hours a day at the printing machines, he would write down his ideas, or as he termed them, trifling thoughts, which preoccupied him almost uninterruptedly.  Out of boredom, and because otherwise he would inevitably have succumbed to despair, he would often read aloud to himself tales and stories of his own invention and composition—‘The Cat,’ for example, or ‘The Dry Dock,’ ‘The Hyena,’ or ‘The Landlady of the Inn’s Manageress,’ or ‘The Death Bed.’”  Beginning at the word “printing machines,” the camera shows the hands of Kulterer and his cellmates as they perform the movements involved in eating; this scene must be one of absolute tranquility and continues until a good two or three seconds after the narrator has uttered the word “deathbed.”  Narrator: “The ideas for these stories came to him mostly at night, and in order not lose them he had to get out of bed in the dark and, while his cellmates were sleeping, to sit down at the table, and, in the midst of that terrible darkness, to jot down what had just occurred to him.”  As this sentence is being spoken the entire breadth of the cell underneath the table at which the inmates are eating is shown, and specifically the camera pans from right to left until it has arrived back at the inmates and is showing their legs underneath the table.  Upon the re-stationing of the image, hence upon the stationary image of the inmates’ legs under the table-top, appears a caption reading: BUT OVER TIME HE HAD DEVELOPED A METHOD OF GETTING UP FROM HIS PALLET AND SITTING DOWN AT THE TABLE SO SOUNDLESSLY THAT THEY NO LONGER PERCEIVED HIM EVEN WHEN THEY WERE HARDLY FAST ASLEEP.  Once the text of the caption has been read, the caption disappears; there is movement under the table; Kulterer rises, but only the legs of the rising Kulterer are shown.  The din attending the inmates’ ejection of the remains of their breakfast through the windows of their cells is heard as the camera gives a view from the window of Kulterer’s cell, a view of the landscape on the other side of the wall of this cell.  A truck driving by in the distance, at the weir.  The clamor of children, as though they are flying a kite.  The woods at the horizon as the narrator says, “One could be transferred from one work group to another.  One could be conscripted into a tougher or grubbier sector or a tougher and grubbier sector if one were found wanting in some way, if one failed to fulfill the expectations that had been set for one by the administration.  But initially, on the day of admission to the penal institution, everyone was always assigned to the more pleasant work sectors.”  As this passage is being spoken the camera shows by turns one work group gathering potatoes on the far bank of the river and another one sawing wood on a trestle in front of the shed.  Suddenly one sees the façade of the church, from which eight or nine inmates are emerging with a warden.  The church square is empty; the camera shows the group of inmates first from the vantage point of the building across the square from the church, then from above, from the church steeple.  No sounds but those occasioned by this group of inmates can be heard.  The narrator:  “It was owing less to his skill than to his sheer incapacity to rebel or to participate in any of the plots, the conspiracies against the administration, that everybody was pretty much constantly hatching, that Kulterer had managed to keep working in the printing works from the very beginning onwards.”  The camera remains stationed at the steeple after the group of inmates has crossed the square and exited the frame, until the narrator has finished uttering the preceding sentence.  Kulterer’s face, as though he were observing from the cell window a scuffle involving his fellow inmates on the square below.  Narrator: “When they bandied blows, it seemed as though brutishness alone would prove viable, and everything else turn out to be sickly and obscene.  Then he would gaze into the profundities of this bunglery that was hopelessly, in the most barbarous fashion, incapable of coping with itself.”  The camera now tracks the footfalls, in other words, the trousered legs, of the guard patrolling the right side of the outer wall of the penal institution; once the guard has reached the end of the wall and hence the last flagstone, crows are heard cawing; the guard turns around.  The guard on the left side turns around.  The left-side guard suddenly halts; the camera cuts to a young man in a butcher’s outfit who has half a pig slung over his shoulder.  The guard (both guards are wearing a black fur cape) rebuffs the junior butcher; the young butcher turns around, vanishes.  The two guards, now standing at the foot of the lookout tower, simultaneously light a cigarette.  Smoke, laughter, their profiles, the backs of their heads.  They crane their heads skyward, but the camera shows nothing but a completely lifeless gray.  Narrator: “It was remarkable, they treated him as if he were not quite worth taking seriously, and at the same time they felt a high regard for him whenever they came into contact with him.”  The heads of the guards move away from each other as the guards’ militaristic footfalls begin to be heard.  The sound of crockery being eaten off of emanates from the windows of the institution.  The boy dressed in black is standing on the church square and blowing into his train conductor’s whistle.  Two cyclists in black Sunday clothes looking at the penal institution as they ride very rapidly across the dam spanning the riverbed.  An inmate in a cook’s apron emptying refuse from a bucket into a large vat at the outer wall of the section of the institution devoted to the kitchen.  The director of the institution behind his desk in his office, explaining something with upraised forefinger to an off-camera warden, laughing.  Denying something with a gesture involving both hands.  Rising and explaining something about the map of the institution affixed to the wall.  Two nuns on the square beneath the director’s office crossing the square, entering the church.  The head of a peasant-woman on the dam spanning the riverbed, turning in the direction of the institution, the head of a boy, of a girl, both of them with schoolchildren’s rucksacks slung across their backs, gazing over at the institution.  A tractor with a trailer in which five or six inmates are crouching.  The striking of the clock in the lookout tower within the sound of the tractor.  The left-side guard abruptly halts and looks up at the window of Kulterer’s cell.  In the cell one of the inmates presses another violently down on to his pallet, while the third inmate is washing himself at the washbasin and looking at the two brawlers.  Kulterer in the opposite corner of the cell observing the scene with wide-open eyes.  In contrast to the others’, his uniform is well-pressed and spotless.  As the camera remains pointed at Kulterer, the narrator says: “All the while that amid their mentally unhinged unconsciousness, amid the forgone certainty of their defeat, they were impulsively scheming at the destruction of the elements, he would stand [agonizing] on the sidelines.”  The inmate at the washbasin dries himself off and spits into the washbasin.  A large black beetle on the floor is shown.  The inmate at the washbasin grins ear to ear; he throws his towel into the washbasin and steps on the beetle; the sound of the beetle being stepped on and crushed can distinctly be heard.  Kulterer turns around and looks at the wall underneath the cell window, climbs on to the bench under the cell window and peers out.  The camera shows him from behind and then shows the landscape outside, which is drab and lifeless.  The drabness and silence of the landscape is suddenly broken by the screams of a sizable bunch of schoolchildren.  The left-side guard polishes his shoes with a piece of sackcloth, pockets the piece of sackcloth; the right-side guard with abrupt hand gestures drives away the boy dressed in black, who runs away and halts amid the bushes towards the weir and blows his train conductor’s whistle.  The institution’s curfew bell rings, is shown.  A handcart full of institutional laundry; the cart is being pulled and pushed by four inmates trailed by a guard; the sound of a gate opening is heard.  The camera cuts to the cart disappearing into an open gateway.  The director of the institution goes to the window of his office and looks down at the courtyard.  He takes a canister of pills out of his coat pocket and hastily sticks three, four pills into his mouth.  Then he takes off his coat and hangs it on the coat tree in one of the corners of the room.  He stretches his suspenders with his thumbs, gives the suspenders a couple of tugs, lets them snap back into place, etc.  The boy dressed in black, who all this time has been sitting in the grass amid the bushes, jumps up and runs away.  The left-side guard is shown, one sees how precisely timed the footfalls of his patrol are, sees his fur cape from behind; suddenly one hears the boy dressed in black blowing his whistle, and the guard abruptly turns around, looks over at the boy, as if momentarily transfixed, then resumes marching.  The camera cuts away from the rear-view of the guard to a pan from one end of the institution to the other.  Dogs, cars, a train, can all be heard.  It is striking with what reposefulness the camera is handled; the locales and incidents of the film are completely isolated from a surrounding world that is probably always anything but reposeful.  The film is an incidence of reposefulness amidst the lack of reposefulness, as well as an incidence of the lack of reposefulness amidst reposefulness.  The film is not irritated by its surroundings; those surroundings are not irritated by the film.  From the steeple of the church the camera shows the church square, which is completely empty; after four or five seconds a group of inmates with a warden crosses the square from the left at the same as a group of inmates crosses it from the right.  As the inmates are crossing the square, the narrator says: “In the last few days before his release, days that weighed very heavily on his heart and on his intellect without managing to overwhelm him, and that found their inhumane expression on his face, he tried to establish contact with the inmates, and often in ways that were moving, as he wished to make this contact firm and lasting, for ever and always.”  Kulterer with the warden in the corridor en route to the printing works; he addresses some unintelligible words to some inmates who are cleaning the floor of the corridor.  Kulterer sits down on his pallet and holds up the four fingers of his right hand, as if he wanted to signify four of something to his cellmates.  He polishes his shoes in a corner of the room.  He sits down at the table and writes.  The narrator says: “The invention of thoughts in the human mind seemed to him the most precious gift in existence.”  He lies down on the pallet and pulls the blanket up over his face.  The whistling of a train can be heard from outside.  One of the cellmates says: tell us a story about somethin’; he says it in a menacing tone, but Kulterer does not tell any stories; he has exposed his face and suddenly pulls the blanket back over his head.  Accompanied by the warden, a barber in a barber’s coat enters the cell.  The cellmates jump to their feet; the warden points at all three of them, signs to the barber that their heads are to be shaved clean, then, turning to Kulterer, the warden says:  leave this ’un be.  He’s goin’ home.  The oldest of the cellmates sits down in the chair in the middle of the cell, and the barber begins to shave his head while Kulterer looks on.  The man being shorn by the barber, to Kulterer:  “’sfunny, your waya lookin’ at that.  Barber: what?  The inmate: ’at thar bit with the beer mug.  The third inmate: Ah don’ unnerstannit, but it’s gooood.  The second one: gooood?  The second one: the ape, what’d he do next?  Kulterer: he fell dead out of the tree.  The man with the half-shaved head, under his breath: dead.  And again: dead.  The narrator, while the camera shows the head of the inmate who has just said dead: “He wrote only sad stories.  Sometimes extremely happy ideas would occur to him, ideas that he himself couldn’t help laughing at, but he was unable to write them down.”  The camera is centered on the cell window, looking outwards.  An old man who could be a scissors-grinder standing on the dam with a wheelbarrow and looking over at the institution.  Suddenly the printing machines, loud; the print shop; Kulterer counting forms.  The camera successively shows each of the inmates stationed at the printing machines.  The imposing figure of the warden standing in the doorway of the entrance, surveying everything; suddenly he looks at the clock.  It chimes stridently.  End of the work shift; the inmates coalesce into a group at the center of the print shop and exit together.  The camera remains centered on the group of inmates until the entire print shop is empty, yielding a view of the darkened doorway of the exit.  The director in the courtyard.  He walks up to the branch of a rose bush and plucks a rose and sticks it in the lapel of his coat.  Looks up at the cells.  All is calm.  Then he takes a couple of steps and suddenly pulls the rose out of his buttonhole and throws it on to the ground; once the rose has fallen on to the pavement, he picks it back up and flings it against the wall, from which it falls on to the grass.  He beckons the warden over.  The warden comes, and the two of them exit the courtyard, discussing something as they walk.  The camera shows them once from behind—they both have their hands interlocked behind their backs—and once from the front.  The director hands the warden a slip of paper; one realizes that it is in fact a list of names.  The warden pockets the list.  A sudden burst of laughter from two nuns who are entering the courtyard; the director and the warden follow the nuns with their eyes as the nuns traverse the entire breadth of the courtyard.  The director and the warden draw to a halt.  The director says: Wiesmayr, Neumann!  Pauses, says: Kulterer.  Kulterer also goes on Saturday.  The warden says: a package, a letter.  The director: a package, a package.  Kulterer is sitting at the table in the cell while the other three now shaved-headed inmates squat on the floor and play chess; no chess pieces are visible, but it is clear that they are playing chess, and three-handed chess no less.  Kulterer has paper with him at the table, but he is not writing.  Slowly, sedately, and starting from the center of the table, he traces circles on the table-top with his right index finger.  Once he has traced the seventh circle, and hence the largest of seven circles of ever-increasing size, he suddenly stands up looks out the cell window.  He goes to the washbowl, in which a towel lies, folds the towel, and hangs it up.  Blows into the washbasin, from out which a butterfly takes wing.  The narrator says: “How clear to him in this darkness, in the middle of this suppressed humanity that in virtue of its regimentedness scarcely dared to breathe, were the contours of concepts!  How clear to him here were even the utmost limits of the remote, the repulsive, the impulsive, the inconceivable!”  As the narrator is speaking these words, the camera shows the face of Kulterer, who is observing the butterfly, which flits agitatedly about the room and then flies out the cell window with Kulterer’s eyes still fixed on it.  Kulterer sits back down at the table.  A loud burst of laughter from his cellmates on the floor signals the end of the chess game.  One of the three stands up and goes to the washbowl and spits into it.  Takes his socks off and begins to wash his feet.  At the same time one of the others is relieving himself in the lavatory, but this is not seen; the only sign of it is the sound of the toilet flushing at the end.  Outside in the corridor several inmates run past in their shoddy shoes, which arouses the attention of the inmates in the cell.  The group of running inmates is not shown, but one can hear them running along the corridor once in each direction.  Kulterer has walked up to the door, is listening out.  Suddenly the cell door is opened.  The warden appears in the doorway, calls out: Kulterer.  Kulterer, who is standing to one side of the doorway, snaps to attention.  The warden hands him an envelope and says: read it through carefully.  Read it through carefully.  The warden exits, shuts and locks the cell door.  Kulterer sits down with the envelope at the table.  The oldest of his cellmates says: his walking papers.  Kulterer takes a large sheet of paper out of the envelope, unfolds it, and begins reading it.  The camera shows the dam spanning the riverbed in its entirety; several nuns are walking along the dam towards the right side of the frame, towards the hills.  From the right side of the frame emerges a truck carrying a pen of livestock.  Over this scene one hears the oldest cellmate saying: study each and every word. Fill out each and every blank.  Kulterer repeats: fill out each and every blank.  Fill out each and every blank.  As Kulterer is saying fill out each and every blank twice in succession, the camera shows in quick succession the dam spanning the riverbed, the left-side patrol guard, the right-side patrol guard blowing his nose, the left-side guard polishing the toes of his shoes, the gardener in the garden, the butcher at work in the kitchen, inmates peeling potatoes in the kitchen, inmates stirring large pots in the kitchen, inmates scrubbing the kitchen floor.  As the oldest cellmate is saying: you must fill out every blank on the sheet, every blank, do you hear me?, the camera shows the tailoring shop, in which inmates are cutting fabric, stitching, sewing on buttons, stacking finished garments; the paper bag-manufacturing shop, in which inmates are gluing paper bags.  You must study each and every word and fill out each and every blank, repeats the oldest cellmate.  Someone is heard loudly spitting into the washbasin.  Suddenly the camera shows Kulterer at the table, studying the piece of paper.  The chess-players are gathering up the chess pieces and throwing them into the box in which they are kept, but this is not seen; the bodies of the cellmates are shown, but the chess pieces are not.  Somebody’s always won, says the oldest cellmate.  A view of the back of Kulterer’s head; he is becoming ever more deeply immersed in his perusal of the sheet of paper.  The narrator says: “All words had the same signification for him, but a good many of them plunged him from the very beginning into a mysterious gloom, into the paradise of a primary color and into numbers and numerals, into a prerequisite for the written.”  As this sentence is being spoken, the camera shows nothing but Kulterer studying his walking paper.  Suddenly, from the washbasin one hears the second cellmate saying: fill it out, why dontcha.  Fill it out.  The sound of the toilet being violently flushed.  Kulterer’s face at the cell window; the camera, filming from outside, shows the dam spanning the riverbed as seen in the distance from the window; on the dam a wind-band is playing, as if in celebration of some holiday; as the direction of the wind changes, the sound of the band first increases and then decreases in volume.  Over this scene the narrator says: “He was afraid that once he had been set free and stripped of his prisoner’s uniform he would no longer be able to write anything, no longer able to think anything; he was afraid that in that savage state of imposed exposure, he would no longer be able to exist at all.”  A train pulls into the railway station, stops; the ordinary passengers detrain and board; only afterwards do the newly arrived inmates detrain from the carriage at the very end; on the platform they are assembled and counted.  Three wardens lead them into the station, where they are handed over to three other wardens; this second group of three belongs to the institution.  The camera shows the inmates en route to the institution.  The newly arrived inmates vanish into the gateway of the penal institution.  Kulterer sits down at the table and fills out the walking paper; the warden, heralded by his loud footfalls, unlocks the cell, enters; Kulterer jumps to his feet and hands him the filled-out sheet of paper.  The warden quickly reads it through, says: something’s still missing!, goes to the table, picks up the pencil there, and corrects something.  Right! he says and goes to the cell door and turns around and says to Kulterer: to the director’s office at eleven, exits and locks up the cell.  Regarding Kulterer, the oldest cellmate says: he done got a lucky break, gettin’ to go home lahk this.”  Shrill laughter.  Silence.  Footfalls in the corridor.  New guys, says the oldest cellmate.  In front of the mirror Kulterer combs his hair, parts it.  The oldest cellmate says: we're goin’ bald, goin’ bald.  While the camera remains stationed on Kulterer combing his hair, the narrator says: “Not the least of the benefactors of his thoughts, and indeed of every part of him, were the deprivity and depravity of the penal institution’s system of deprivation.”  Having combed and parted his hair he sits down on his pallet and gazes motionlessly at the cell door.  The narrator says: “Now he took leave of the buildings.  How beautiful and perfectly obedient did he all of a sudden find the lineation of the walls, a lineation much stronger than all those years.”  The entire time that the narrator is speaking his commentary, Kulterer is staring at the cell door and paying no mind to the activities of his cellmates, who are wholly preoccupied with cleaning and tidying up the cell.  Behind a frontal view of Kulterer staring at the cell door, photographs of various parts of the institution are projected.  The narrator says, “One can see very distinctly that this is a cloister,” and a cloister is shown, etc.  The narrator says: “There is of course no difference between a cloister and a penal institution, he thought; the only difference perhaps is that the cloister is a voluntary and the penal institution an involuntary prison; the cloister is something one imposes on oneself and that one can leave whenever one chooses, whereas one is incarcerated in the penal institution compulsorily and cannot leave it whenever one chooses.”  As this text is being spoken, images centered on the architectural beauties of the penal institution that was formerly a cloister are projected behind Kulterer, whom one continues to see sitting on his pallet and staring at the cell door.  The narrator comments on what is being projected: “He discerned the harmoniousness of the irregularities in the masonry, the characterful antiquity of the gables and ledges, the noble munificence of the stairways, the gentle buoyancy of the edges of the windows,” says the narrator.  And he says (as the thing he mentions is being shown): “The chapel, which he had repaired to for mass every day of the entire year-and-a-half, he now suddenly beheld with his new eyes.”  Now, behind the Kulterer sitting on the pallet and staring at the cell door, one is actually shown another Kulterer casting his eyes around the interior of the chapel; this second Kulterer catches sight of the other Kulterer; Kulterer observes himself, and the narrator says: “And above all he noticed the work tools that hung on the walls of the courtyard, that lay on the floor of the shed; the multitude of old-fashioned rakes and gables and ledges!  He had always used to enjoy heading for the meadows and fields.”  Now one sees Kulterer observing himself as he heads for the meadows and fields, watching himself as he crosses the dam spanning the riverbed, clad in only a pair of trousers, with a shovel and a rake, his prisoner’s cap on his head, with several other prisoners.  The narrator says: “But he always found the warmer season here more oppressive than autumn and winter.  One cuts too vile a figure under the warden’s knout when the sun is out!” the narrator says and adds: “And the laughter of the countrywomen that one hears wafting over from the farms is a terrible abyss.”  As the word “terrible” is being spoken the background images vanish; by the time the word “abyss” is being spoken the camera is showing nothing but Kulterer still sitting on the pallet and staring at the cell door.  The camera looks through the cell window at the dam spanning the riverbed, on which a large group of inmates can be seen walking from the right to the left side of the frame.  The narrator says: “He had never worked in the woodcutting crew; he was too weak to do so.  The young people were naturally always worming their way into the woodcutting crew; they were hoping to escape.”  In the background behind the Kulterer staring at the cell door the other Kulterer descries a steel trap in the shed, and the narrator says: “They’ve been catching beasts of prey with such steel traps for centuries, he thought.  How did this steel trap get here?"  While the camera continues to show Kulterer sitting on his pallet, it also shows the warden swinging his truncheon in the courtyard, in the center of the courtyard, during the midday walk; he shouts: “C’mon, c’mon, Kulterer!” which causes Kulterer to quicken his pace.  The narrator says: “The warden is tall and fat and strikes as quick as a flash.  They all call him ‘the rubber sausage’ because he often uses his truncheon to get attention, to get legitimacy.”  “C’mon, c’mon!” shouts the warden; all the inmates start to walk faster; eventually they are running; the warden yet again shouts: “C’mon, c’mon!,” whereupon the inmates run even faster; the camera is stationary, and the running inmates are scarcely even any longer recognizable as running inmates.  Yet again the warden shouts: c’mon!  c’mon!, then the narrator says: “Short, muttered utterances—that is his style.”  At the file of running inmates the warden bellows: incorrigible beasts! and: this is a grave misunderstanding indeed, you bastards!  Kulterer, still sitting and staring at the cell door, now sees himself unpacking the package that has been sent to him by his wife, and the narrator says: “these packages always contained the same items—meat, butter, paper, socks, a letter. He always dreaded unpacking the package, along with reading the letter; he had always been fearful of this, fearful of the distressful state into which the unpacking of these packages and the reading of these letters had always sunk him, fearful of this recrudescence of shame within him.”  He sees himself arranging the contents of the package in front of him on the table.  The narrator says: “During the night he had surprisingly written a story entitled ‘Logic,’ a meditation.  Now, as he was unpacking the package, he asked himself, what sort of word is this word logic anyway?”  The camera, stationed at the opposite side of the square, is pointed at the church, at the church bell, which is being struck by its clapper.  From the clock a view of the square below; an inmate with a music book, accompanied by a guard, enters the church through the right-side door.  Then the two of them as seen from above, as they ascend the spiral staircase.  The inmate sits down at the organ, places his hands on the keyboard, plays the beginning of Bruckner’s AVE MARIA while the guard sits in profile in one of the pews and eats a snack.  As if for fear of being observed by the inmate, the guard turns to face the inmate.  The camera is pointed at the hands of the inmate, who is playing calmly and in the manner of a trained organist.  A nun at the altar, watering flowers. In the right-side rear doorway of the church appears the boy dressed in black with his train conductor’s whistle, which he blows without making a sound that anybody hears.  The camera is stationed on the church square, at the imposing church gate, and is pointed at the slaughterhouse across the square, where a cattle truck has just arrived.  Two patrol guards who are wearing white butchers’ aprons and white butcher’s caps, but who are still immediately recognizable as patrol guards, yank open the rear door of the cattle truck and goad the cattle that come rushing out, four cows and calves, into the slaughterhouse; the sound of this cattle being unloaded from the truck and goaded into the slaughterhouse is now audible through the cell window; the camera is stationed at the cell door and pointed at the cell window, below which Kulterer is standing and holding in his hands the paper in which the package his wife sent him was wrapped.  He folds up the packing paper and stuffs it under his mattress.  Read us something, says the oldest cellmate, and the two of them, the oldest and the other one, sit down on their pallets and wait for Kulterer to read something to them.  Kulterer begins to read to them; he announces the title of the story he is about to read to them: Logic, he says, and the camera exits the cell and heads to the dam spanning the riverbed, moves far into the countryside, and then, as if it has been away as long as the time Kulterer has taken to read his story, it returns to the interior of the cell, where Kulterer is now folding up the sheet of paper on which is recorded his story entitled “Logic.”  The moment Kulterer has finished reading, the narrator says: “He did not allow himself to be tempted into believing that they had been impressed, but he was very happy.”  Kulterer looks up from his piece of paper and says: there is absolutely no such thing as injustice!  His cellmates curl up on their blankets on their pallets.  The narrator: “In his own case no detectable injustice had been done.  He had done what one was not permitted to do, and he was being punished for it.  Where does the border of freedom lie and whence is it arrived at? he asked himself.”  The camera is now in the cellar; inmates shoveling potatoes are shown.  So are inmates shoveling coals.  A group of inmates on the railway embankment.  One sees inmates cleaning a railway car at the freight station, from which the rear façade of the penal institution is shown.  “He never thought of escaping,” says the narrator as the camera shows the inmates cleaning the railway car and behind them the entire penal institution.  The cell door is slammed shut; Kulterer is alone in the cell.  The narrator says: “Initially he had trembled whenever the door of the cell was shut and locked behind him; although he had not had a rebellious bone in his body, he nevertheless found himself in an enormously downtrodden condition on every such occasion.  On such occasions, the word backtalk had used to be written all over his face as a matter of course, but he never uttered it.”  While the narrator is speaking these lines, Kulterer is standing perfectly still at the cell door that has just been slammed shut behind him.  The sound of the door being locked and of the warden walking away is distinctly audible underneath the narrator’s voice.  Kulterer goes to the cupboard and takes out a loaf of bread that his wife has sent him and breaks off a piece of it and puts the loaf back into the cupboard and sits down at the table as he eats the piece of bread.  Now footfalls are heard; the cell door is unlocked; the cellmates enter; behind them the door is immediately shut and locked by the warden.  The narrator says: “In the penal institution there were a large number of more primitive, much less endurable work sectors.  It was not quite clear what the criteria were for assigning a person to one work sector rather than another.  His cellmates had suddenly been assigned to work in the tannery.”  While the narrator is saying this, the newly arrived cellmates are taking off their jackets, then their shirts.  The narrator says: “In all but a tiny minority of cases, the privilege of remaining in the printing sector or in the kitchen could be but of the briefest duration.”  The camera cuts to Kulterer, who observes the three returnees from the tannery from his seat at the table as the narrator says: “If it had ever occurred to him to reflect on the matter, he might have realized that he was the only person who had survived as long as a year-and-a-half at the penal institution’s printing works.”  The camera cuts to the cattle truck in front of the slaughterhouse.  The two patrol guards in long white aprons shut up the loading bed of the truck, jump into the cab of the truck, and take it on one complete circuit around the courtyard.  As the truck is driving around the church square, the organ begins to be played; it is the beginning of Bruckner’s AVE MARIA.  The camera cuts to the hands of the organist, to his forehead, to a view of his prisoner’s jacket that makes it easy to count the buttons on the jacket, to the forehead of the judicial officer who is guarding him, to a view of his jacket like the one we have just had of the inmate’s, a view that likewise makes it easy to count the buttons on the jacket.  The closed eyes of the guarded man and of the guard in succession.  The camera cuts to a bird’s-eye view of the nave of the church.  Suddenly the organist slams shut the keyboard of the organ; the prisoner jumps to his feet in a mechanical fashion, as if he has just received an order to do so.  The prisoner and the guard peer into the interior of the church; then they descend in single file from the upper to the lower level; the camera follows the two of them as they pass through the full length of the nave and through the vestry, then across the church square, and then vanish into the same place that the cows and calves were goaded into earlier.  The face of the director of the institution, who says directly to the camera: a complete absurdity, this ordinance is a complete absurdity!  As he is placing a document on his desk, and speaking into the camera, addressing the warden: a complete absurdity.  Reality is a different matter.  The camera cuts to the warden, who is facing the director.  A close-up first of the warden’s face, then of the director’s face, the of the warden’s face; a close-up of the director’s face, as he says: intelligence knows nothing, my dear man, intelligence knows nothing.  Infamy.  Insecurity, my dear man; as he says this, he leans back, taps his desk with his pencil.  Interesting, very interesting, says the director.  Infamy, insecurity, absurdity, you understand.  After a pause he says: ignore it, just ignore it, you understand.  The camera is always pointed at the warden’s face when the director is speaking and at the director’s face when the warden is speaking.  The organist’s permission to play was granted by me, not by the Monsignor, you understand, says the director, and hands a document to the warden.  The warden stands up, makes as if to leave.  The director says: next time you go to Steyr, bring me back some dog lard, so that I can use it as an ointment, you hear me.  Two large cans.  He laughs.  The warden by way of reply: two large cans.  Exit the warden; the director looks at the door, which the warden has just shut.  Then he delves into Document No. 340697, which bears the heading of KULTERER, FRANZ, and which the warden has self-evidently just delivered to him.  The camera shows Kulterer naked from the waist up as he washes himself at the washbasin; his cellmates at the table observe him.  As Kulterer stoops over the washbasin, the narrator says: “Without knowing himself how it was possible, he was often the one person who was capable of relieving the often considerable tensions between the inmates and the administration, and indeed of subduing the outright open hostility that would sometimes break out between the two power blocs.”  The camera cuts to the inmates, who are playing a game on the floor.  The cell door is unlocked, yanked open; the warden enters and stations himself at the door; he leans against the door and in alternation observes Kulterer washing himself at the basin and the cellmates playing chess on the floor.  Kulterer leaves off washing his upper body, dries himself off, and says to the warden: yes, yes, I know, Mr. Warden.  He puts on his shirt and goes up to the warden, who along with him vanishes from the cell.  As he watches Kulterer leave, the oldest of the cellmates on the floor says: two mo days; then he goin’ home.  The camera remains pointed at the cell door as the footfalls of Kulterer, who is walking down the corridor with the warden, grow ever softer, and as the narrator says: “During that entire time there had not been a single complaint lodged against him, nobody at the penal institution, among either the administrators or the inmates, had ever expressed any grievances against him.  Nobody had ever been less than well-disposed or even rudimentarily ill-disposed to him.”  The camera shows the waiting room of the institution’s doctor, in which three inmates and one warden are sitting the moment Kulterer enters with his warden.  The warden knocks on the door of the surgery, hands in a slip of paper, and sits down with Kulterer on the one unoccupied bench.  The camera cuts to a view of the dam spanning the riverbed, a view extending all the way to the weir, as seen from the waiting room; it is half-past five in the afternoon; the workers are heading home along the roadways on the dam.  The camera cuts to a bird’s-eye view of the two patrol guards, who, having just looked over at the homeward-bound laborers, are just beginning to move apart from each other.  The gardener stops working.  Two nuns enter the church.  From two directions groups of inmates arrive at the church square and enter the penal institution.  The camera cuts to Kulterer who is now jumping to his feet because he has just heard the nurse call his name; he enters the surgery; the, warden, walking behind him, halts at the door of the surgery.  A train pulls out of the railway station.  As the camera shows the departing train as seen from the roof of the penal institution, the narrator says: “Despite the matter-of-factness that at the very moment of his sentencing had come into being within him like an elemental transmutation of the structure of his brain, that had set to work, had begun to dismantle and assemble at a radical level, had begun meting out justice point-blank, he had found it terribly difficult to submit himself to the new powers that be, to the facts, to the state of being a prisoner, a lawbreaker, a fellow destined for a well-nigh immeasurable stretch of time to be a criminal, a penitentiary preparation.”  Dusk.  Four or five laborers are working in the rubbish dump, unloading rubbish; the rubbish is visibly reeking; the car from which the rubbish is being unloaded is of primitive manufacture; one can tell that these are the last inmates who are still working today.  Once the car has been unloaded, the inmates remain standing amid the rubbish and button up their jackets, then they get into the car and drive to the penal institution.  As the camera is showing the corridors, in which supper is being apportioned, cell doors are opening, troops of meal-distributors busying themselves, distributing bread, a large refectory in the background, so to speak, of this scene, is filling with inmates; these are evidently the prisoners who have been assigned to the outside work crews.  These two settings, the corridors and the refectory, blend into each other, and masses of inmates are shown, masses of inmates who are being fobbed off, a gray voracious crowd of men is shown, a crowed that is in the midst of eating and that moves about in the corridors and in the refectory and in the cells as it eats; eventually, hundreds of eating inmates—their mouths, jaws, hands—are shown; eventually, there seems to be nothing in the world other than eating, than the slurping and gulping of the hundreds of inmates in these scenes.  Crowd shots of men eating and slurping, biting, guzzling, alternate with close-ups of mouth and tongue and chin movements.  The camera cuts to the two patrol guards at the front exterior of the penal institution at the edge of the riverbed as they both move away from the lookout tower and apart from each other; they halt; look up at the cells, from which the sound of eating can be heard; the rubbish dump is shown, the boy dressed in black is shown standing in it, and he blows on his whistle; it emits a shrill, brusque tone; immediately afterwards the two patrol guards at the edge of the riverbed turn around, they halt and turn around and immediately resume walking; their black fur capes contrast starkly and continuously with the gray evening landscape across the riverbed.  A shrill chiming sound is heard in the corridors, is heard outside coming through all the windows.  The camera cuts to a hearse, which is driving across the church square; it eventually crosses the dam spanning the riverbed and drives past the weir.  The doctor walks across the church square in the company of the nurse.  An old-fashioned stethoscope is stuffed in the pocket of his doctor’s coat.  An inmate can be heard screaming in a cell in one of the upper stories; the nurse turns to the doctor as she continues walking alongside him; the doctor takes no notice of the screaming.  Now the immediate environs of the penal institution are shown; first the dam spanning the riverbed and the landscape behind it in a single reposeful take; then, moving to the left, the camera shows the town of Garsten; it soars over the town’s roofs then descends into its streets and squares, which at this time of day present a soothing aspect; shopkeepers are shuttering their windows, the taprooms of taverns are filling with customers; laborers in boiler suits are heading homeward.  A few junior bakers and baker’s apprentices are brawling in one street.  Guild signs.  Windows.  Portals.  Suddenly one sees that the penal institution is in a town that is a so-called heritage architectural site.  A barman rolls a beer barrel into the doorway of a tavern.  Suddenly the camera cuts to the wall of the institution facing the railway station, with its barbed wire fence, then to the lookout tower, with the railway station in the background; freight trains are moving this way and that.  Railway men whistle, tap on the brake blocks.  Old women at the windows.  A railway man hangs his uniform up on a nail with a brisk, expert movement of his hand, stretches out his legs, takes a footbath in a sheet metal washbasin.  These tableaux are shown quickly in succession, over a matter of seconds, and indeed throughout the film all the scenes in which neither Kulterer nor the reposeful landscape is seen must follow each other very rapidly.  Several railway workers, track repairmen, go into the bar of the railway station; the barmaid is shown; she is standing as if impaled on the two brass taps and staring into the barroom.  A view of the crowded barroom, packed with diners, drinkers; in the left corner, next to the bar, a table at which prison officers in full dress uniform are seated.  A prison officer appears in the doorway of the barroom; those at the table rise, exit to the street, climb into a Black Maria.  The camera cuts to Kulterer, who is standing completely naked beneath the cell window and drying himself off.  The oldest of his cellmates says: he got skin like a child’s.  The three cellmates are sitting on their pallets and drying themselves off.  They slip into their prison uniforms as Kulterer remains standing naked at the window all the while.  The narrator says: “He was afraid that once he had been set free and stripped of his prisoner’s uniform he would no longer be able to write anything, no longer able to think anything; he was afraid that in that savage state of imposed exposure, he would no longer be able to exist at all.”  The inmates walk across the church square and into the church.  The church is barely a third full.  The occasion is the daily evening service.  In the first row of pews sit some nuns.  Sprinkled among the congregation of inmates, as if in strict compliance with regulations, sit several surveillance officers.  The organ is being played by the same inmate who was shown playing it earlier.  Down below the inmates begin singing: Hail, star of the sea.  At first the singing is faint and hesitant, and then it gradually swells to a loud drone.  Dawn. The camera pans from right to left across the entire dam spanning the riverbed, all the way to the weir; no people, nothing.  Birdcalls.  The two patrol guards, standing alongside the portion of the wall of the penal institution that faces the riverbed, are huddled together in conversation.  For this take the camera is stationed at the dam.  A view of the cells, of Cell 38, looking upwards from the patrol guards’ perspective.  As the window of this cell is being shown, the narrator says: “Early on the morning of his release he was summoned to the director’s office.  He must now thank the director for his residence in the penal institution, said the warden, who was escorting him.”  A shot of the director’s office.  The door is opened, Kulterer enters.  Before this scene there may be interpolated one showing Kulterer being escorted all the way from Cell 38 to the director’s office, a scene showing the angles and convolutions of the corridors as the warden swings his truncheon; in accordance with the regulations the warden will be walking one pace behind the inmate, behind Kulterer; he will have his truncheon in his hand, not hanging from his jacket.  En route to the director’s office they will run into a so-called cleaning corps, equipped with rags and abrasive brushes with wooden handles, at work.  Or after the scene in the church the viewer may be shown either the inmates in Cell 38 asleep on their pallets as the singing of the congregation of inmates in the church continues to be heard, or Kulterer at the table writing a story, but in either case there will be a shot panning across the entire riverbed-spanning dam all the way to the weir, a shot imbued with the light of dawn, the perfect reposefulness of the landscape, and birdsong; or on the third hand after the church scene one may be shown the previously seen barroom, now filled with drunken laborers, or the boy dressed in black with the train conductor’s whistle, now standing behind the front window of his parents’ house not far from the penal institution, or the boy dressed in black sitting at the kitchen table of his parents’ house and doing his homework late at night; or one may be shown some fairly or very old people standing behind various front windows in Garsten, old men and women in nightdress drawing their curtains; or one may be shown the porter’s lodge of the penal institution as one hears the chorus of prisoners singing, droning, “Hail, Star of the Sea,” in each case one will hear the chorus singing; in the same scene as that in which the porter’s lodge is shown, one will see an officer shutting the drawer below the lodge’s window, a drawer into which he will have just placed two revolvers; he will sit down in his chair and stare out the window at the cobblestone pavement outside; several porter’s caps, which are all prison officer’s caps, will be hanging on  the wall; on the floor a police dog will be lying or crouching.  As the scene in the director’s office begins, the chorus of prisoners abruptly falls silent.  The camera is stationed behind the director and pointed at the door; enter Kulterer, followed by the warden; one sees Kulterer over the director’s head; the director has a head with a bald spot atop which during this take Kulterer’s face is poised, and atop Kulterer’s face the warden’s face is poised in turn; the scene must be filmed in such a way that Kulterer’s face is precisely poised atop the director’s balding head, and the warden’s face is precisely poised atop Kulterer’s face; this image is exemplary and will subsequently be consulted as a reference standard if it is filmed in an exemplary and precise way; when the director says: well, well, well, so now it’s your turn!, the distance between the director and the two men standing in the doorway, Kulterer and the warden, is at least four meters.  Slowly the camera descends to the level of the back of the director’s head, so that one can see that he is wearing a dressing-gown trimmed with silk braid; the camera stops once it has reached the back of the chair, and then one sees only the back of the chair and the director’s shoulders, as the director says: where do I have your file?  Where the hell do I have your file!; these words are accompanied by the successive yanking open and slamming shut of several drawers in his desk; the sound of the opening and shutting is loud, irritatingly loud, as is the sound of the director’s voice, especially when he says: where the hell do I have your file?, after which there ensues a pause during which one hears nothing but the conspicuously loud opening and shutting of desk drawers.  A pause.  Then: ah, here it is!  The director says this dryly, curtly.  All this time the frame is occupied exclusively by the director’s back and the back of the chair.  The camera re-ascends and shows the back of the director’s head, as the director says: Franz Kulterer, born 1911 in Aschbach, is that correct? Whereupon Kulterer, who at this point is completely invisible, says: yes, yes.  The director: married, with no children, is that correct?  Kulterer: yes, yes.  The director says “is that correct?” as if it were a matter of habit for him to say “is that correct?” at every opportunity, to say “is that correct?” to all and sundry.  Then the director, of whom one has yet to see anything but the back of his head, with continuous special emphasis on his bald spot, says: there are no outstanding charges against you.  Now the camera moves upwards to reveal the utterly overawed Kulterer, with the warden standing behind him.  Kulterer is completely motionless, with sunken shoulders, behind him the warden is sweating; there is visible sweat on his forehead.  The director, who can no longer be seen, says: you can actually take your breakfast outside your cell today.  Outside.  The camera is motionlessly centered on Kulterer and the erect figure of the warden behind him, as one once again hears the irritating racket of desk drawers being opened and slammed shut. A pause.  Then the director says:  so what are you going to do once you’ve been released?  Kulterer is unable to come up with any immediate reply.  The camera cuts to the director’s face, which is expectantly awaiting a reply from Kulterer.  OK, fine, says the director, you of course know how you’ve got to behave out there.  The formalities have of course been taken care of.  But just because you’re now being released, that doesn’t mean…says the director.  At the word “released,” the camera suddenly cuts to the director’s face (sic [either an indication of a cut to, for example, Kulterer’s face, has been omitted, or, as the end of the sentence suggests, for “face” we should read “mouth”] (DR)), just because you’re being released, that doesn’t mean…says the director, speaking directly to the camera, and only his mouth is visible.  After the director says the word “mean,” his mouth stops moving as Kulterer is heard saying: yes, yes, I know.  The camera is once again pointed at Kulterer, the warden is now standing to Kulterer’s immediate right with his hands folded in front of him as the director says: the formalities have of course been taken care of.  By me personally, no less.  The director leans back; he is pondering something having to do with Kulterer; then, gazing fixedly at Kulterer, he says: tell me…Suddenly: aren’t you the man with permission to write?  Stories etcetera.  Papers etcetera.  In short, short stories etcetera, says the director.  The camera cuts to Kulterer, who says yes.  The warden casts his eyes around the director’s office; the director’s office is visually itemized as the narrator says: “Regardless of the circumstances, he had always found it most beneficial to be unassuming.  Of course, like every human being, he had often felt a deep-seated need to improve his existence, to extricate himself from certain states of affairs that even he saw as constricting; but he had no desire to exert himself however faintly at the cost of the slightest impression of force, or to impel himself towards achieving anything that he instinctively felt and hence believed was beyond his due.  Throughout his life he had had at his disposal a small and indeed to all outward appearances completely insignificant, infinitesimal, ridiculous space; but he was forever painstakingly attempting to fill this space, and eventually, over time, it was no longer merely with his own intermittently sky-hung dreams that he was qualified to fill, and indeed devoutly decorate, his personal space and time.”  As the narrator is speaking these lines, the interior of the director’s office is shown; on his desk there are pictures of his family, photographs that reproduce the stultified, petit-bourgeois atmosphere in which the director feels at home; along the walls there are objects that assert this stultified petit-bourgeois lineage and atmosphere and present existence.  Once the narrator has finished speaking his lines, the camera cuts back to Kulterer, who has all the while been standing before the director in the same posture, with the palms of his hands flat against his thighs, in accordance with prison regulations.  The camera is pointed at Kulterer as the director says: well, well, that was a very rare perquisite you enjoyed.  To grant permission to write to a prisoner!  Until he reaches the word “prisoner,” the camera is pointed at the director’s face, and immediately after the director has said the word “prisoner,” the camera briefly freezes.  Over this frozen-frame shot of the director’s face the narrator says: “Often it was merely the desire ‘for it to be about a house’ that got him out of bed and sitting at the table; often it was not even a thought of that kind, but rather merely a single word, the word ‘turnip,’ for example, the word ‘altar,’ the word ‘hoof.’  All words had the same signification for him, but a good many of them plunged him from the very beginning into a mysterious gloom, into the paradise of a primary color and into numbers and numerals, into a prerequisite for the written.”  All the while that the narrator is speaking these lines, the image remains frozen and centered on the director’s motionless mouth.  After the narrator has finished, the director resumes speaking; he says: what have you been writing all this time anyway?  Kulterer: oh, nothing to speak of; the camera is pointed at Kulterer as he is uttering this sentence, “oh, nothing to speak of.”  Stories, probably, as the camera continues to show Kulterer; yes, yes, stories, says Kulterer, as the camera now shows the director.  You of course know, says the director; the camera cuts to the walls of the director’s office, and it remains trained on them as he continues speaking, thus: you of course know that throughout your period of employment here the costs of your incarceration have been deducted from your wages; you know that, of course.  Yes, yes, replies Kulterer; the camera unperturbedly continues its survey of the interior of the director’s office.  The government requires you to pay taxes as well; you know that, of course!  Then: do you want to have the money right now, or would you rather have it mailed to you?  Where are you going to live anyway?  Are you going back to your wife now? asks the director.  Yes, yes, says Kulterer.  All right, says the director, you surely must have been given our address as a reference.  It will of course enable you to obtain a position somewhere.  Make sure you apply for a job at a print shop; you’ve got really good prospects in that line of work!  The camera cuts to the director’s face.  It’s astonishing how much people learn while they’re with us!  It’s really astonishing.  A man like you will be missed in our print shop.  The camera cuts to Kulterer; the director quips: so, even though you’re being let go, you aren’t being fired, you’re getting your money.  All right, says the director; the camera cuts to him, and he hands Kulterer a large gray envelope.  Kulterer takes the envelope; in order to do this he must step up to the director’s desk; he hesitates, then he takes three or four quick steps forward, seizes the envelope with a quick, awkward movement, steps back again; again he lays the palms of his hands against his thighs, which he finds difficult to do while holding the envelope; the camera films all this from the side, and it continues to film from the side as the director says: you are to hand this envelope over to your local police department.  Everything after that will happen automatically.  You of course know that you have to report to that department once a week.  Yes, yes, I know, says Kulterer.  The director extends his hand to him; Kulterer takes a couple of steps towards the hand and offers his own hand to the director as the warden remains standing in place.  The camera pans from left to right along the walls of the director’s office as the narrator says: “Kulterer says he is much obliged to him; he is, he says, saying this not in deference to any regulations, but rather out of a genuine, sincere feeling of gratitude.  He was ashamed of having not alighted upon any better words.  He had prepared a sentence of leave-taking for the director, but at the moment when he was supposed to deliver it the sentence had proved irretrievable.  Very well, then, the director says, and he dismisses Kulterer.”  As the narrator is uttering this last sentence, the camera shows the director saying “very well” and dismissing Kulterer.  The camera cuts to a view of the end of the corridor, from which Kulterer, carrying his envelope, is emerging, followed by the warden; as the two of them, walking along the darkened corridor, approach the camera, the narrator says: “In the corridor Kulterer had the feeling that the warden, who was walking behind him, was well disposed to him.  Oddly enough he had never been afraid of the warden, in contrast to his fellow-inmates, who were worried to the point of panic about being forced to be alone with that man in the darkness of the corridors.”  “Juhthank him?” asks the warden as he prods Kulterer around a corner with his truncheon.  Yes, yes, says Kulterer.  The camera now shows the dam spanning the riverbed in the clear light of morning.  The guards on patrol along the walls of the penal institution.  The junior baker rides past the patrol guards on a bicycle with a breadbasket, veers into the church square.  The camera cuts to the playground, to a scene of children tossing a ball about, sliding down an iron slide.  The boy dressed in black is cycling across the dam spanning the riverbed and gazing over at the penal institution.  The camera cuts to Kulterer’s cell; Kulterer is sitting at the table with his face buried in his hands, which are resting on the tabletop.  He is now seeing the things that are being projected behind him: inmates in kitchen aprons and guards in the kitchen, inmates in the corridors, in the courtyard, in the church square.  A patrol guard gazes into a large stockpot; somebody beating an inmate raises his rubber sausage; inmates are taking off their shoes, washing themselves, pulling their blankets over their heads on their pallets; a sheaf of paper falls through the window of the cell; with his face still buried in his hands he sees himself jump to his feet and pick up the sheaf of paper; all the while that he continues sitting at the table, he sees himself laying the sheaf of paper on the table, he unwraps the paper, smooths it out; he sharpens his pencil under the watchful eye of the warden and begins to write; he writes as the narrator says: “How extensively here did everything that elsewhere was ignobly throttled by insensitivity and tribulation disclose itself!  How diffidently, amid this veritable landscape of darkness, which was completely devoid of unnatural sounds and smells, could one think here!   How trustingly could one feel everything in the aggregate here!  To think that here it is possible to say something true that elsewhere would only amount to a lie!  He thought: here I can propound something that in the outside world is inhumane!  And with what daredevil discreetness!  There is a relation to light and to darkness here that can lay claim to truth only here.  If I leave this place, it will die.”  As these lines are being spoken, the camera shows Kulterer with his head buried in his hands on the table, and at the same time, in the projection behind him, it shows him sitting at the table and writing.  The narrator says:  “And if he had not been the most uncommunicative of individuals, the very most taciturn of all the inmates, he might have been constantly muttering to himself, distinctly enough, in order to offend himself and everyone else as deeply as possible, these words: I’m leaving and killing myself, I’m stepping outside and killing myself.  But this is preposterous, he said to himself.”  Before the narrator has finished uttering the words “offend himself and everyone else as deeply as possible,” Kulterer is seen taking his leave of the buildings.  He enters the kitchen, but he does not approach any of the inmates working there; he passes by each of them, looks at each of them, but he does not offer any of them his hand.  He enters the tailoring shop.  All the inmates who are working here know him, and he knows all of them.  They do not stop working; the camera shows Kulterer entering the tailoring shop; once he has reached the center of the room, of the tailoring shop, it shows him exiting the tailoring shop, in other words, from behind; the same in the laundry shop; the same in the cobbler’s shop.  In the cobbler’s shop he stops in the center of the room and offers his hand to one of the inmates working there.  Throughout this tour, Kulterer has been on his own, without the warden, as if he had already been released.  The equipment in all the shops is incredibly primitive and without the slightest hint of modernity; for example, in the tailoring shop the inmates are sewing by hand, and the shop contains only a single oversized sewing machine; the same in the cobbler’s shop; the same in the laundry shop, where from a large steaming copper boiler laundry is being removed and thrown into a tub filled with cold water; like the scenes in the other workshops, this one is reminiscent of the locales in Dickens’s novels.  The camera shows Kulterer in the courtyard, in complete solitude he walks the entire circumference of the courtyard; the camera shows only brief snatches of this circuit, shows him glancing up at the lookout tower two or three times and at the same time shows the guards looking down at him from the lookout tower.  Up in the lookout tower Kulterer espies the warden with his rubber sausage.  The narrator says: “They all call him ‘the rubber sausage’ because he often uses his truncheon to get attention, to get legitimacy.”  Now the warden enters the courtyard, in which Kulterer is standing.  The narrator says: “He loves to walk his beat in tight trousers; he is tall and fat and strikes as quick as a flash.”  Kulterer is standing at the outer edge of the courtyard underneath the lookout tower and looking at the ground, is if he is searching for something on the ground.  The narrator says: “Rebellion inevitably leads to doubled pain.”  From over the walls one hears music being played on wind instruments, as if a funeral were taking place.  The music is precisely metrical; in time with it, Kulterer takes a few steps of his walk around the courtyard.  Suddenly behind one of the cell windows somebody screams; Kulterer looks up at the window from which the screaming has emanated.  The camera shows the porter’s lodge, in which three guards are sitting and doing paperwork; suddenly the Black Maria arrives and two policemen, guards, leap out of it; they open its rear doors and two new inmates climb out; each of them has a bundle of laundry under one arm.  As Kulterer is walking in the garden, the camera shows him sitting at the table in the cell and reading a story to his cellmates.  But his voice is inaudible as the narrator says: “He wrote hundreds of stories in the penal institution.  His cellmates marveled at the number of them, and he always wrote them at night, while they were sleeping.  In the course of time he had gotten used to writing in the dark.  To writing ‘The Cat,’ for example, ‘The Dry Dock,’ ‘The Swimming Bird,’ for example.  He asked them why it had taken them so long to hit upon the idea of having his stories read to them,” says the narrator.  While he is now being shown walking through the garden, one also sees his cellmates sitting on their pallets and reading Kulterer’s stories; each of them is reading some stories to himself.  The narrator says: “Kulterer was delighted that they were now taking an interest in his stories, whereas earlier they had not evinced even the slightest interest in them; quite the contrary.”  As Kulterer is walking through the garden, the camera first hazily and then more distinctly shows Kulterer sitting at the table and writing while his cellmates sleep.  He rises from the table and walks over to his pallet and smooths and straightens out the covers and goes back to the table.  Now one of his cellmates is observing him; Kulterer is peering into and leafing through a file folder; in this folder he has placed a few of his stories.  He reads to himself the title “The Cat”; the title is shown; then he leafs through some more pages and reads the title “The Dry Dock,” this title also is shown, as are, after more spells of leafing-through, “The Warden,” “The Deathbed,” and “The Director.”  He shuts the folder, pushes it aside, and slides a stack of blank paper into position directly in front of him.  The camera shows him writing the word SOLITUDE on the first sheet.  He pauses for reflection, looks around the cell, in which everybody is either sleeping or pretending to sleep, and begins to write.  Shortly thereafter the warden’s footfalls are heard in the corridor, and Kulterer jumps to his feet and clears away everything from the table and lies down on his pallet; the warden’s footfalls grow fainter, fall silent.  These shots are seen at the same time as, and are superimposed on, the shot of Kulterer walking in the garden.  Now the shot of the cell vanishes; Kulterer is walking in the garden; the camera shows Kulterer standing still and looking all around the courtyard.  A sudden peal of bells, equally sudden silence.  The camera, now stationed on the roof the penal institution, is pointed down, along the outer wall facing the riverbed, at the two patrol guards, who are moving away from each other as they measure out the steps of their patrol.  Outside, on the dam spanning the riverbed, roughly in the center of the frame, one sees the boy dressed in black, who suddenly falls to his knees and blows his train conductor’s whistle.  The patrol guards do not react to the sound of the whistle.  The boy gets up and runs the entire length of the dam from left to right.  Moving from right to left, a flock of birds flies past the weir and then over the entire town.  The camera cuts to the warden, who is walking along the corridor towards Kulterer; only from their silhouettes can one recognize the warden and Kulterer in the almost completely darkened corridor; Kulterer is standing at one end, and from the opposite end the warden is approaching him; the camera shows the two of them in alternation: Kulterer standing perfectly still, and the warden approaching him, swinging his truncheon, whistling curtly; all of a sudden, the warden’s gait has something buoyant, cheerful, about it; the uncouth, militaristic quality his gait has always had is suddenly gone; but just as quickly, a couple of paces away from Kulterer, or better still as early as halfway along his approach to Kulterer, the buoyancy and cheerfulness of his gait is gone, and he is walking in his usual manner; he is holding the truncheon against the side of his leg; just before he reaches Kulterer, he comes to seem even taller in juxtaposition with Kulterer than he actually is, and he asks Kulterer: did you thank them?  Yes, yes, says Kulterer.  It is not clear what Kulterer is supposed to have been thankful for, but Kulterer automatically says yes, yes, because he has always said yes, yes; the warden expects nothing from Kulterer other than a yes, yes, Mr. Warden, and it is quite remarkable that he is suddenly saying just yes, yes, not yes, yes, Mr. Warden, which accords well with his release from the institution.  The camera shows the warden and Kulterer from the side, their profiles; one can see that the floor at the opposite end of the corridor is being scrubbed; inmates with washrags and abrasive brushes with long handles have just come from around the corner.  Suddenly Kulterer says: I was awkward!  The warden asks: what do you mean?  Kulterer says nothing in reply; after a pause the warden says: too stupid, and then: you haven’t had such a bad experience with me, have you?  Whereupon he waits for a categorical reply from Kulterer.  He is impatient because the answer is not immediately forthcoming.  Yes, yes, I know, says Kulterer.  Now the electric lights suddenly come on; everything is brightly illuminated; the camera shows the full series of cell doors along the corridor—from one end, then again from the opposite end.  An inmate in the cleaning corps pours lye out of a bucket; another inmate immediately scrubs the floor with a brush.  The warden raises his rubber truncheon up to the level of Kulterer’s stomach and pokes Kulterer gently in the middle of the stomach.  As if to say: you’re a fine fellow, but he does not actually say it; he says nothing; he turns around and goes up to the cleaning corps: Bastards! Incorrigible beasts!  This is a grave misunderstanding indeed!  Bastards!  As the warden is saying this, the inmates are standing still in silence; at a movement of the warden’s head in their direction they resume working, in the course of which one of them knocks over the second bucket of lye directly in front of the warden’s feet; but the warden ignores the incident; he fingers his truncheon and vanishes.  The camera, stationed below the cell window, is pointed at the door of the cell, which is yanked open; the four inmates jump to their feet; the meal corps is there with the warden; the warden says to Kulterer: you’ll get back the envelope when you leave.  The meal-deliverers distribute the meals.  The warden says to Kulterer: your farewell meal.  To the inmates who are distributing the meals he says: it’s certainly no perquisite, distributing meals.  He says this because the way they are going about distributing the meals is too lackadaisical for his liking. “Move! Move!” he orders them; they quicken their pace of work and scoop lukewarm beverage rations out of a gigantic zinc bucket that two of the inmates are holding by two large zinc handles.  From a cardboard box they distribute slices of bread.  Each prisoner receives four pieces.  The warden says to Kulterer: by this time tomorrow our Kulterer will be sleeping in a nice, clean bed.  Kulterer stands there, with his hands flat against his thighs, and says automatically: yes, yes, Mr. Warden.  Now, as the camera image stops, freezes, the narrator says: “He was convinced that the warden had intended no malice by what he had just said, that to the contrary he is well disposed to him.  It would be out of the question for anyone to bear me any malice, he thinks.”  The camera image is like a photographic snapshot as the narrator continues: “He had of course always been impeccably punctilious, always the model of correct behavior; he had never evinced so much as a trace of the apple-polishing hypocrisy that some people might now be attributing to him.  To the contrary!  He admittedly never allowed himself to utter even such words of praise as these, but he got the feeling that the warden had always been satisfied with him.”  Now the camera once again shows the darkened corridor, shows the warden walking through the corridor, for two, three seconds; then the word rubber sausage is yelled out behind him from one of the cells, whereupon the warden turns around as quick as a flash and dashes into the cell from which the word “rubber sausage” was yelled.  From this cell screams are heard.  The camera cuts to a view of Kulterer in the courtyard; beside him, as one immediately sees, is the warden.  The warden says: I’ll bring you a rope so that you can tie your writings together.  Exit the warden.  Kulterer slowly lifts his head towards the sunlight.  Kulterer’s cell.  The three cellmates are sitting at the table and gazing at a silent Kulterer, who is standing at and gazing out the window; then he turns around and gazes at them.  The camera image is frozen, like a photographic snapshot; the narrator says: “His cellmates were of the opinion that he regarded this day as a day of celebration; they could not know and could not conceive that this very day was the most terrible one in Kulterer’s entire life.”  The camera image begins moving again; from off to the side, at the table where the inmates are sitting, the oldest of them says: “Why the hell aren’t you telling us anything?  Tell us just one more tale before you bugger off!  The camera image has once again frozen into a photographic snapshot; the narrator says: “Now that he had only a few more hours to spend with them, he was all of a sudden shutting himself off from them.  Why?  They certainly had nothing against him, never had had anything against him.”  The film begins running again; from off to the side at the table the oldest cellmate says: Come on: let us keep a couple of your stories!  The second-oldest rises and goes to his pallet.  Let us keep a couple of ’em! says the oldest cellmate; Kulterer turns around and looks out the window.  The camera image is a photographic snapshot as the narrator says: “the things they were saying now had for him the air of some mutually agreed-upon hearty sendoff of his corporeal self, whom they were basically happy to be getting rid of.”  The film resumes running.  They curl up in their pallets.  The camera shows Kulterer in the office of the penal institution’s secretary; the secretary is tall, lean, and one-armed; probably he lost his other arm in the war.  Kulterer hands him the envelope; the secretary opens it; unfolds the large sheet of paper that he has pulled out of it, stamps it, and hands it back to Kulterer.  Kulterer bows.  The secretary lights a cigarette, leans back in his chair, pulls open a drawer in his desk, leaves the drawer open, and with a motion of his hand signals to Kulterer that he should leave.  Kulterer bows again and leaves the secretary’s office; he looks around for the warden, but the warden, who has always escorted him throughout the term of his imprisonment, is no longer there; Kulterer is irritated by the warden’s absence, by the fact that he is all of a sudden alone, bereft of the warden, by the fact that he can move about the corridors and go into the penal institution’s workshops as if the warden were present at his side to keep an eye on him; Kulterer leaves the secretary’s office.  The camera shows him walking along the corridor, then going into the print shop, first from the corridor looking into the shop, then from the front of the shop looking into the corridor: the moment Kulterer enters the print shop the printing machines are loud; the inmates at the printing machines look at Kulterer; the guards who are sitting at the front of the shop immediately jump to their feet, but they sit back down when they see that the person entering the shop is Kulterer; the camera shows Kulterer taking his leave of the individual inmates in the printing shop, shaking their hands; the whole thing is quite brief; he says something, but what he is saying cannot be understood, because the printing machines are so loud that nothing apart from them can be heard; while he is shaking the hand of one of the inmates, the camera image suddenly freezes, becomes a photographic snapshot, over which the narrator says: “Whether they believe it or not he finds it hard to set off.  He would much rather stay.  He finds leaving ‘unimaginable.’  But you can’t stay anymore when you’re being forced to leave, he says.  Even if you were to make an appeal to the courts, such an appeal would be rejected, he says.”  The film resumes running; at this moment the inmates at the printing machines burst out laughing; their laughter is so loud that it can be heard even above the racket of the printing machines.   Again the camera’s view of the print shop freezes into a photographic snapshot, over which the narrator says:  “Kulterer says he wants to give them a present, something for them to remember him by.  Naturally, he says, he has no idea whether they will get even the slightest amount of pleasure from the thing that he has decided to give them, but they might find it useful later on.  I have written something for each of you, he says.  An aphorism for each of you.”  Now the film is running; Kulterer pulls out of his jacket pocket some pieces of paper that he distributes among them one at a time, but the camera shows only two, three of these sheets with which he is preoccupied.  The camera is in Kulterer’s cell, in which all the cellmates are present.  Kulterer hands each of them a slip of paper, which they read straight away; the reading of the slips instantaneously makes them thoughtful.  The narrator says: “And for his cellmates he wrote aphorisms, an aphorism apiece for each one of them.”  Kulterer is consolidating his toiletries.  The cell door is unlocked, and the warden throws in a rope that Kulterer can tie his writings together with; the camera shows this, or it does not show it; but it does show the cellmates helping Kulterer pack up his things; they lay everything on the table and roll it up in a cloth, and as they do so one cannot tell whether the cloth is a handkerchief or a foot-rag.  The oldest cellmate ties up the package containing Kulterer’s writings, pulls the final knot taut, and briefly lifts the package just once up to the level of the table, and says, see, tight as can be, to Kulterer, and sets it down on the table.  Kulterer tentatively lifts the package; the others laugh at his test-lift.  The narrator says: “He felt a powerful sense of foolishness, because his tentative lifting of the package possibly struck them as being funny.”  What are you gonna do with your stories? the oldest of his cellmates asks.  Sell ’em!  The newspapers snatch ’em up like hotcakes!  But will they print yours?  ’Atsa tough question.  Yes, yes, says Kulterer.  The narrator says: “They were very sorry that they would have to do without him from now on.”  The camera now shows the courtyard again, then the cell windows overlooking the courtyard, then the cell windows on the side of the institution facing the riverbed, then those overlooking the church square, which two nuns are crossing; a baker’s boy is running across the church square; the butcher’s truck drives past; on the dam across the riverbed a company of soldiers are marching, singing a song; at the railway station a train is departing; the camera first shows the train station from the penal institution, then the penal institution from the train station; a woodcutting crew with hoes and saws are leaving the premises of the penal institution; a truck with inmates who are engaged to work at a nearby plant-nursery drives past, with the church square in the background.  Kulterer enters the church, climbs up to the gallery, where the organ-playing inmate with his guard is improvising on something by Bruckner.  Kulterer stations himself next to the organist, which the guard initially is not inclined to let him do, as one may gather from his briefly rising from his pew; but in the end he does allow it; Kulterer listens to the organ-playing; now one sees him peeking into the laundry shop, but not going into it; he gazes at the work-tools that are hanging on the walls in the courtyard, at the baroque angel by the staircase; then again at pitchforks, scythes, and sickles; he sits on the stairs and through the open gate, towards the town, on the other side of the porter’s lodge, he observes the boy dressed in black, who is blowing his whistle, but nothing is heard; Kulterer sees the boy dressed in black running away; two nuns enter through the gate, at whose threshold the boy dressed in black was standing just a moment earlier; they approach and pass by Kulterer and proceed to the church, from which the playing of the organ can be heard.  While Kulterer is looking through the gate, the narrator says: “But nobody has yet managed to escape, he thought.”  The camera cuts to the porter’s lodge.  To Kulterer’s cell.  The camera, slowly panning from right to left, now shows individual objects in the cell: the closet, the washbasin, suddenly all the details that had been seen only indistinctly become clear; the cell is empty; all the inmates are away.  As the camera is panning from left to right across the walls of the cell, the narrator says: “There was hardly ever a night, and in the past year-and-a half pretty much not a single further night, in which he had not been awoken by an idea or at least by a thought, by a hint of a thought.”  The camera also shows the floor of the cell, cockroaches, other beetle-like insects, etc.  The narrator says: “He began his conversations mostly with ‘Yes, yes, I know…,” and he would say, for example, ‘Yes, yes, I know, it’s hard…’ or ‘Yes, yes, I know that can turn out badly…,’ or ‘Yes, yes, I know, Mr. Warden…’  But he really never spoke unless he had just been asked a question.”  The camera shows the empty corridors, the completely empty print shop, the completely empty laundry shop, the completely empty cobbler’s shop, the empty courtyard; every place is empty; the church is empty, the church square is empty, etc.  The camera cuts to the dam spanning the riverbed, which is completely empty.  To the penal institution as seen from the dam.  The two patrol guards are standing at the ends of their patrol-paths, the one at the right end, the other at the left end, motionlessly.  The boy dressed in black is crouching motionlessly in the center of the frame, in the church square.  During this sequence the narrator says: “It was in prison that he had first come genuinely to reckon with thoughts, as if with sums to be added and subtracted.”  The camera now shows Kulterer sitting in the kitchen and spooning up soup from a plate.  Then he stands up, then he walks through the print shop, then he walks through the cobbler’s shop; he emerges from the church; he rises from the chair at the penal institution’s secretary’s desk; he is in a clerical office and being handed a stack of banknotes, which he attempts to count, but he is incapable of doing so.  Yes, yes, says Kulterer and leaves the office with the banknotes in his hand.  The narrator says: “The invention of thoughts in the human mind seemed to him the most precious gift in existence.  From this decisive moment onwards, the world was in his eyes purifying, and readily amenable to the researches of concentration and precisely delimited consciousness.”  Now, as Kulterer is shown sitting at the table—he has his head in his hands, which are resting on the table, and his legs stretched out under the table; he is alone in the cell; he has his belongings in front of him on the table—the camera shows him arriving at the penal institution, the moment of his incarceration; it shows him being shoved out of the Black Maria, passing by the porter’s lodge, entering the corridors, walking through the corridors; the warden appears before him; the warden shoves him into the cell, in which his cellmates are lying on their pallets; over these images the narrator says: “For the first time, from then onwards, there had been solid ground beneath his feet, a sky above the earth, a hell, the rotation of a global axis without precedent.”  As the narrator is saying “the rotation of a global axis without precedent,” behind Kulterer sitting at the table the camera shows woodcutting crews, laundry crews, in a confused heap, as if as he sits there at the table Kulterer is once again having a nightmare about arriving at the penal institution.  It shows the warden beating an inmate over the head with his truncheon, the director grinning, the secretary crossing the courtyard, several inmates standing huddled together, as if forming a conspiracy, other inmates masturbating in their pallets, bursting into laughter.  Over these last two sequences the narrator says: “Conjectures formed from perceptions were suddenly followed by the rudiments of a singular objective.”   The camera shows Kulterer running through a long corridor; suddenly the camera image stops moving; the shot of Kulterer running is brought to a complete stop, so that the camera image again looks like a photographic snapshot, over which the narrator says: “Anarchy was switching itself off automatically, so he thought, on either side of his path.”  The camera image resumes moving; the film is suddenly running at an incredible speed; all the previously shown scenes, from that of the empty print shop, the empty cobbler’s shop, onwards, fly by so quickly that one can scarcely recognize them any longer, behind Kulterer as he sits at the table.  Once the succession of images has attained its peak of rapidity, such that pretty much not a single place is any longer recognizable as what it is, there is a short shout from Kulterer, as though he is waking up from a bad dream.  He raises his head, his entire upper body, rises in stupefaction from the table, all of a sudden becomes aware of his situation once again.  He looks around the cell.  There is nobody there.  The cell is completely empty; Kulterer notices on the floor the cockroaches and other beetle-like insects that the camera has already shown once before.  The narrator now says: “In the last few days before his release, days that have weighed very heavily on his heart and on his intellect without managing to overwhelm him, and that have found their inhumane expression on his face, he tries to establish contact with the inmates, and often in ways that are moving, as he had wished to make this contact firm and lasting, for ever and always.”  Kulterer climbs on to the bench beneath the cell window and looks out; the camera shows what Kulterer sees through the cell window, namely, the completely empty dam spanning the riverbed, on which the boy dressed in black is squatting; suddenly he jumps up and blows the train conductor’s whistle; the sound of the whistle is so shrill that Kulterer covers his ears; but it is clear that apart from Kulterer nobody has heard this whistle-blast.  Kulterer climbs down from the bench and pulls out of the package containing his belongings a pocket-watch; he polishes the watch on his jacket-sleeve and puts it back into the package; earlier he held the watch up to his ear to check if the watch was even still running.  Standing rigidly in place, Kulterer looks down at the tips of his toes, as if wishing to satisfy himself that he is still wearing institutional shoes, that he is still wearing institutional clothing at all.  During this sequence, the narrator says: “All initiatives and attempts from his side were prompted by the word “farewell.”  The warden opens the cell door, enters with a bottle of spirits, which he places on the table.  They are all expected to drink from this bottle in honor of Kulterer’s separation from them.  They all sit down at the table and drink, each of them taking one brief, spastic swig.  After they have all drunk, the warden takes the bottle away from them; he sticks it in the inside pocket of his jacket.  He has put the rubber truncheon down on the table.  Suddenly he stands up and says: I’ve still got to go to the director, a formality, he says, exits, shuts and locks the cell door.  His footfalls can be heard growing fainter, then suddenly louder again; he enters the cell and tosses a small clump of clothes on to the table.  “Come on, get changed!” he shouts at Kulterer.  He exits the cell, shuts and locks the door; Kulterer sits down at the table, embraces the small clump of mufti.  His cellmates observe him from their pallets.  Come on, get changed! one of them shouts in mimicry of the warden; then shouts once again, in dialect: C’maawn, gitcherself changed!”  Kulterer crouches down and doffs his prison uniform.  The narrator says: “Now his cellmates are incessantly giving him pointers, rules of behavior prescribing what he has to do after his release, but he was unable to take in any of these rules, because the men were talking all at once.”  As the narrator is speaking this sentence, there are gesticulations from the cellmates on their pallets; two of them jump to their feet, walk up to Kulterer, signify something to him, lie back down on their pallets, etcetera.  The camera shows Kulterer standing completely naked beneath the cell window; over this shot the narrator says: “He now suddenly felt a horrible feeling of forlornness, a feeling that, because all those terrible stares were being affixed to it from all sides, he soon found unbearable.”  The oldest cellmate says: “You’re gonna ketch a cold!”  And after a pause, the second cellmate says: “His skin’s as white as a child’s.”  Kulterer looks as though he feels cold as he stands beneath the cell window.  From outside one hears the shrill blast of the train conductor’s whistle, which has probably been blown by the boy dressed in black; the shrill blast is heard a second time, whereupon the oldest cellmate jumps to his feet and, aiming for his stomach, throws Kulterer his underpants, shirt, trousers; Kulterer catches his garments in an anxious attitude.  His shoes are thrown at his feet by the oldest inmate.  Put ’em on! shouts the oldest cellmate after throwing himself on to his pallet.  Kulterer suddenly and quickly puts everything on.  He is nauseated by the alien smell exuded by his own clothes.  He is trembling from head to toe, as though he has just received a beating.  Again, the shrill blast of the train conductor’s whistle is heard; one more time.  Go get nice and plastered when you git out! the oldest cellmate says to Kulterer.  The second one says: How’d they nab you anyway?  Huh?  The man who said this mimes the action of catching a hare from behind.  Yes, yes, says Kulterer.  Yes, yes, says Kulterer.  Did they beatcha? asks the third cellmate.  And didja bleed?  Didja, on the head, they beat everbawdy on the head, you betcha.  They got no mercy.  Kulterer shakes his head.  And what aboutcher wife? asks the oldest cellmate. What about her?  What’d she think?  What’s she thinkin’?  What’d she say?  What’d she do?  She know you’re comin’ home? asks the second-oldest cellmate.  Didja write her?  Eh?  The eh is drawn-out, gentle.  Before the second-oldest cellmate has finished emitting this “eh,” the camera image freezes into a photographic snapshot, and the narrator says: “He would have a nice train to catch at noon, they said.  They asked him how much money he had left.  If he had any left at all.”  The film starts running again; Kulterer says, yes, yes.  He sits down at the table and writes something down on a slip of paper.  The narrator says: “He hastily writes down their addresses and asks them to remember him kindly.”  As the narrator is saying, “to remember him kindly,” Kulterer is seen rising from the table and saying something to his cellmates, but what he says is inaudible; then one hears the oldest inmate again saying, you betcha, and as Kulterer is walking up to the cell window and climbing on to the bench and looking out the window, and the cellmates are watching him doing this, the narrator says: “They said to him that it was no simple matter to step outside; that the world was cold and unforgiving.” At this very moment the door is yanked open and the prisoners are led away.  The cell door remains open.  As he continues standing under the cell window, Kulterer can now hear all the printing machines, can hear the sound of them wafting over from across the courtyard, into the room from the corridor; the ever-increasingly loud sound of the printing machines drowns out all other sounds for him; the rhythm of the printing machines grows so loud that it soon becomes deafening, and Kulterer presses his hands to his ears.  He goes to the table and bends down over his still-warm prison uniform and weeps.  Then he makes sure he is not forgetting anything, he checks all the coat hooks, the storage rack, looks under the pallets, runs the palms of his hands over the walls.  Suddenly the shrill blast of the train conductor’s whistle is again heard from outside through the cell window.  Kulterer stows away his package of writings, which had been placed on the table, and exits the cell.  The camera shows Kulterer walking at normal speed through the corridor, then walking progressively faster through several corridors, then suddenly running through all those corridors; Kulterer’s flight from the penal institution is shown in several brief, successive shots: he is seen running past the print shop, past the laundry shop, past the bakery, past the butcher’s shop, faster and faster and across the courtyard and across the church square and out of the entire complex, past the porter’s lodge and into the town and through the town, through its narrow and (to him) unfamiliar streets and past its numerous (to him) unfamiliar people, more and more quickly.  Once he has reached the dam spanning the riverbed, he takes one more look back at the penal institution; the patrolling sentry guards are clearly recognizable; the building’s chimneys are smoking; Kulterer is standing perfectly still on the dam spanning the riverbed; then the shrill blast of the train conductor’s whistle is heard; the boy dressed in black jumps up from a patch of grass and runs away, and Kulterer is horrified by this event and walks as quickly as he can “away from the prison and into the adjacent landscape, whose grayish-brown hillocks reek of hopelessness.”

Mošćenička Draga, Yugoslavia, 1973 

             

  

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2014 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Der Kulterer.  Eine Filmgeschichte  (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 7-91.