“In darkness, everything becomes clear.”

Thomas Bernhard – Three Days is one of those rare portraits in which the filmmaker’s presence shapes every moment without ever imposing itself, guiding the flow of thought while allowing the subject to remain fully himself. Harun Farocki once described documentary as the art of arranging time; what Ferry Radax arranges here is solitude. Georg Vogt is right to call him a literary filmmaker, since he does not film people so much as he films the movement of their thinking. In Bernhard, he found a subject whose thinking is already cinematic: rhythmic, repetitive, self-correcting, darkly comic, and as angular as the cuts that shape this three-day conversation. The film becomes a study in how consciousness performs itself when given nothing but open space and a listening camera.

Bernhard sits on a bench in a Hamburg park, reluctant at first to “play himself,” eventually consenting to respond to a series of keywords Radax has prepared. This simple compromise yields a portrait in which artifice and confession blend into something more elemental. The park becomes a resonating chamber, an outdoor confessional where even the air seems to carry the weight of recalled experience. He speaks of playing a role in Lessing’s The Great Scholar and being unable for 20 years to move beyond the first line of an experiment he compulsively reenacts, as if treading a Möbius strip that mirrors his own philosophical dilemmas. He remembers the butcher shops of his childhood, the density of smell and sound that remains lodged in him with splinterlike insistence. He recounts the funeral of his brother’s friend, where he and his brother were beaten, their bicycle destroyed. These flashes enter abruptly and with startling clarity, then vanish again, as if delivered by a fragile projector that stutters between realms.

Radax punctuates the monologue with irregular fades to black. They do not function as dramatic gestures but as a kind of blinking, a punctuation suited to the syntax of thought. Bernhard often halts mid-sentence, not to create effect but because futility interrupts him, and the film chooses to honor these hesitations rather than conceal them. In the pauses, the park’s ambient life swells and the image inhales. One senses the weight of what remains unspoken, as though silence were an additional speaker at the bench.

When Bernhard reflects on isolation, he does so with the fluency of someone who has made loneliness his intellectual province. School was isolation, writing is a deeper isolation, and the self becomes a terrain that expands the longer one inhabits it. “If you are alone for a long time,” he says, “if you have become trained in loneliness, you discover more and more where for the normal person there is nothing.” He describes the page as a dark surface on which words suddenly appear like lightning strikes, as if language arrived from the same darkness it attempts to illuminate. Radax mimics this sensibility by allowing images to materialize from blackness with the same tentative grace.

Bernhard then recalls the sanatorium of his late teens, where illness and boredom pressed him into writing: “You either go mad or you begin to write.” For him, writing is less a craft than a disturbance, “the root of all evil I have to cope with now.” Yet when he turns to Vienna, his tone softens. The city’s melancholy, its overheard conversations, its minor tragedies unfurled on trams, all contribute to what he calls a “wonderful prerequisite for melancholy.” Vienna becomes a collaborator in his worldview, a place whose atmosphere trains one to hear the undertones of everyday communication.

Darkness is not a rhetorical flourish but a form of being. It is the origin from which truth emerges and the terminus to which everything returns: “The darkness is ultimate. It is farewell. It is everything.” Radax allows this final movement to settle without commentary, ending the film not with resolution but with an intake of breath, as if we are meant to accompany Bernhard toward that darkness rather than retreat from it.

A bonus interview from 2010 offers context without diminishing the resonance of the original film. Radax recalls reading Bernhard’s Frost and disliking it, yet becoming increasingly fascinated by the mind behind the work. He describes the challenges of filming, the elegant estate chosen as a location, Bernhard’s resistance to being directed, and the way the structure emerged as a matter of contingency rather than design. Above all, he insists on attention to detail. That attention is palpable in every frame of Three Days, which stands as one of the most intimate and spacious portraits ever made of a writer. It approaches documentary not as exposition but as shared solitude, a space constructed with meticulous care so that loneliness itself might speak.