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The Butterfly Hunter
- a Film
- by Harald Bergmann
- Description (english) This film is a radical test-case for Godard’s notion that ‚ a film must have a beginning, a middle and an end ‚ but not necessarily in that order’. It is no biopic or film-version of a book, though it does follow Nabokov’s traces closely, especially the novels Ada or Ardor and the autobiographical Speak, Memory. In both these novels the theme of time is central ‚ and the film too, in content and form, is a meditation on the phenomenon of time. At the beginning stands the ‚ moment of awakening’ that Nabokov describes in his autobiography: in an old flickering ‚ homemade movie’ he sees his pregnant mother and an empty pram awaiting him, as yet unborn. The work of Sector 16 in this film was to create this “homemade movie” from the beginning of filmmaking. The 16mm-sequences are used as a guiding theme in this film.
