In B for Bartleby, Angela Summereder embarks on a cinematic journey that does not simply seek to adapt a literary text, but to dialogue with it—to deconstruct it, to let it breathe in a new language. Her film-essay, presented at the Viennale 2025, takes as its starting point Herman Melville’s 1853 story Bartleby, the Scrivener, but it goes far beyond translating that fable of passive resistance to the screen. What Summereder proposes is something far more daring: to turn the very act of translation—from word to image—into a reflection on loss, memory, and the desire to fulfill a promise.

The original impulse comes from Benedikt Zulauf, the director’s partner, who passed away before he could realize his dream of filming Bartleby. By taking up that unfinished idea and bringing it to life, Summereder not only continues a project left incomplete but also builds a space where the intimate and the literary intertwine. Her film is both a tribute and a search. Within it, Melville meets Zulauf, and Bartleby becomes a double figure: the man who resists participating in the system that oppresses him, and the absent companion who left his desire suspended in the air. The film is born, then, in that terrain of intersections where mourning and creation blur together.

The director avoids the easy path of representation. She doesn’t attempt to tell the story of Bartleby, but rather to explore what that story awakens in those who read it, remember it, or embody it. The camera moves through spaces where Melville’s words seem to echo in the walls, in the voices that recite them, in the silences of those who listen. There are readings, fragments, performances, discussions. Everything unfolds in a constant movement between past and present, between Melville’s house in Massachusetts—now a museum and a set—and the echoes of Zulauf’s life, who worked for years at the Austrian Film Archive, surrounded by texts, images, and the ghosts of cinema. The result is an essay on the impossibility of a perfect translation. Summereder seems to suggest that every attempt to turn a word into an image is also a form of loss—but a necessary, fertile loss, one that generates new readings. “I would prefer not to,” says Bartleby, and that seemingly simple refusal becomes, in the film, a poetic principle. To refuse is not to reject the world, but to open the possibility of another language, another way of being in it. In this sense, B for Bartleby is as much a reflection on literature and cinema as it is a declaration of creative freedom.

As the film progresses, Melville’s text dissolves into the experiences of those who interpret it. It’s no longer about reproducing a story, but about allowing oneself to be permeated by it. Collective readings, scenes in museums, and images of young people playing soccer—apparently unrelated—merge into a single current that overflows any narrative structure. Summereder seeks not a closed form, but a kind of breathing, an emotional correspondence with what has been lost and what still endures.

The personal thus becomes political. The figure of Bartleby—the scrivener who “would prefer not to”—resonates as a metaphor of resistance against forced productivity, alienation, and the logics of control that govern our lives. But here that resistance is not expressed through violence, but through tenderness, through a gesture of restraint that is also an affirmation. Summereder transforms “I would prefer not to” into a way of saying yes to another kind of cinema: one that does not obey, that listens, that allows itself to hesitate. The film ends with a serenity that is not closure but opening. In the stillness of an afternoon at the Austrian Film Archive—the place where Zulauf once worked—Melville’s words and Summereder’s images are reconciled. It no longer matters who wrote or who filmed, but the fact that someone wanted to, that there was a shared desire to transform a story into a gesture of love and persistence. B for Bartleby is precisely that: a luminous elegy about the need to keep creating, even when words seem to resist becoming images.