Bitef

103

Regardless of whether you are famous or unknown, that experience must make you feel totally and absolutely alone. When the majority of the population is clamoring for your execution and refusing your attempts to defend or explain yourself, perhaps what you are feeling is not just desperation. You slide further into states of mind that are incomprehensible to those who have not also experienced them... We feel that everyone latently carries within themselves the hint of destruction, even if it comes from some unimportant incident in the schoolyard or from a family conflict or errors with unpredictable consequences in social or professional circles... From receiving the Nobel Prize and being the pride of a small nation to being threated with execution for treason - that plot line ranks with the Greek tragedies. Herostratus would have to settle for less. Sisyphus could finally catch his breath in the shade. The background is as philosophical as anyone is prepared to make it... And 50...h0w do we as the makers of this production cope with balancing macro and micro, far and near, general and personal in such a way as to stay grounded and invite the public to gather around the kitchen table with someone? All the puppets are identical to Hamsun, the associative circumstances cannot be determined any more than they already are, and most of the text is made up of citations from his body of literary work. There is no need for us to disappear into the documentary. No interpretations or statements are necessary. We simply want to make pleasant conversation and have some interesting moments when it is possible to communicate in silence and subconsciously in the light of an obvious backdrop. The puppets can talk, think, hesitate, doubt themselves, take long pauses to think matters through again, even offer healthy doses of humor, the black kind and the cheerful kind. They can listen to music with us and remember family members who have passed on or their childhoods in the same way that we recall our own voices from the past, in short, we truly want to show one individual outside the terrain of guilt or innocence. We hope that individual can be taken for someone's brother, friend or even, maybe, for ourselves. And not just Knut Hamsun. In order accomplish this, we have to explore the poetry of it all, with music,

THE WRITER