Film and Fate: Camera Flashes Illuminating a Life

In Film and Fate: Camera Flashes Illuminating a Life, Ilse Aichinger describes her past and her present largely from the viewpoint of her abiding passion for the cinema, and for still photography. She reflects on her life by discussing directors ranging from Luchino Visconti to Leni Riefenstahl, actors ranging from Orson Welles to Stan Laurel, and photographs by Bill Brandt depicting subjects as diverse as the Brontës Haworth Parsonage and Londons East End. Though Aichingers recollections are detailed, intriguing and vivid, they are pervaded by her sense of the contingency and fragility of existence of how the presence of pictures and people in her life presages their disappearance, and of how memory shatters easily when you try to master it.

The translator: Geoff Wilkes is a Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. His previous translations include Irmgard Keuns Gilgi, One of Us and some short pieces by Hans Fallada.