João César Monteiro: Snow White + Tibaldus

The Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro moved far away from the visual opulence defined by his earlier films with his inspired adaptation of radical Swiss writer Robert Walser’s anti-fairy tale. Carefully restricting the image track, Monteiro maintains an almost totally black screen in order to focus instead on the voices of Snow White, the Prince, the Queen and the Hunter, engaged in an extended debate about love, free will and the events leading up to the fateful attempt on the maiden’s life. Despite its visual austerity, Branca de Neve (Snow White) is haunted by the arresting images with which it begins – infamous black-and-white photographs of Walser lying dead in the snow after his heart attack outside a Swiss asylum at the age of seventy-eight.

Before we enter the cinema, theater collective tibaldus will plays a scene (approx. 15′) from Robert Walser’s verse dramolette Schneewittchen (1901), one of the unconventional Fairy Tales he wrote alongside Aschenbrödel (Cinderella, 1901) and Dornröschen (Thorn Rose, Sleeping Beauty, 1920). Tibaldus was founded in 2009 by Simon De Winne, Hans Mortelmans and Timeau De Keyser while studying at KASK School of Arts in Ghent. With Ivona, Princess of Burgundia (2016), The Marriage (2018) and Operette (2021), they made a trilogy around the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Currently, they are working on the texts of Robert Walser.

35mm print: Cinemateca Portuguesa, with English live subtitling
A celluloid black image can not be emulated by a digital screen, so this is the only way to really ​“see” the film.

“Snow White is one of the most profound creations and one that is enough on its own to explain why the most playful of all writers was a favorite author of the merciless Franz Kafka. Robert Walser starts where the fairy tales stop. ​‘And if they are not dead, they live now.’ Walser shows how they live.” (Walter Benjamin)

The fact that Disney is celebrating its 100^th anniversary this fall is purely coincidental.