Directing
The message is all in the white spaces between one letter and the next: the rest doesn't matter. One cold winter morning, Dr. Fleischmann (literally, ‘man of flesh') realizes he is starting to lose his memory. So begins a morality tale, in a dream-like state in which truth and fiction become entangled and lose their contours. The main character, a scientist, is reluctantly drawn into a world - his disease - in which mysterious bonds prevail: those between fate and the biological and physiological criteria that regulate existence. The film is based on a story of the same name by Giorgio Pressburger.
The story of a central European family whose ranks include the names of some of leading historical figures of the last two centuries (Marx, Heine, Mendelssohn, Husserl, etc.). In a study that interweaves past and present, the narrator relives the memories and human dramas that enabled him to understand "what it means to really belong to the human community of the living and the dead".
Italian writer Giorgio Pressburger is wracked with self-doubt as he seeks out signs of his own religious faith in this documentary; in so doing he lays his life experience bare, topples all his certainties, gives the lie to hypocrisy and penetrates the most hidden corners of the human mind. He examines childhood fears, adulthood and its lies, and the enlightenment that comes with grace. With the help of fellow travelers like Dostoyevsky and Kafka, Pressburger boldly takes on the problems of evil and suffering as found in very different cultures. His is a priceless example of bearing witness and an in-depth look at the workings of the soul.
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