Film and Fate: Camera Flashes Illuminating a Life

Translated by Geoff Wilkes

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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 London’s
East End. Though Aichinger’s 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.”