Claude Régy

“Who can he have been”. Rilke asks the question. To this day, nobody has come up with an answer. A drug addict, alcoholic, incestuous, mad, obsessed with self-destruction, and imbibed with Christian beliefs - born to a Protestant father, and Catholic mother. Born in Salzburg in 1887, he signs up, after interrupting his studies, as a military pharmacist in 1910.
He is 23 years old.
Four years later the First World War breaks out in Europe.
The young pharmacist-soldier finds himself on the Grodek front, unable to cope with the numbers of the injured or the severity of their wounds. A world full of the agonizing shrieks of men and horses alike, their guts spilling out, amputations, and head-wounds.
The poet-pharmacist keeps by certain drugs reserved for the injured for his own personal use.
He dies from a cocaine overdose.
Accidental death or suicide, nobody knows.
The Battle of Grodek: “All roads lead to black decay”. His final poem: Grodek.
Dead at the age of 27 years old.
First publications of his poems at the age of 21 years old. In six years of writing, Trakl creates a lifetime of work.
Trakl and Rimbaud, genius-like in their shared precociousness.
Laconic and intense, Trakl brings together the seemingly irreconcilable, to devastating effect.
Ever sensitive to rhythms and sounds, attentive to silence, he opens up interior spaces within us. We enter into a mode of perception beyond that of pure intelligibility.
Trakl is all about a magical organization of language.
He reaches out to us at the very centre of our being and our contradictions.
Claude Régy
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Running time: 55 min.