2024-03-22 13:23:25
Film “A Library of the World”
Umberto Eco’s final secrets
As of: 2:23 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
Writer Umberto Eco (1932 to 2016)
Quelle: Leonardo Cendamo/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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Umberto Eco’s private library was legendary. Now it can be seen one last time, in the cinema. The family tells of Eco’s fondness for occult sciences. The grandson reveals which work from Grandpa’s collection scared him as a child.
At the beginning of the wonderful film “A Library of the World”, the famous professor and writer Umberto Eco (1932 to 2016) walks through the long, floor-to-ceiling shelves of his private library in Milan. The camera follows him room by room, takes him along confusing paths through the book maze, and finally single-mindedly pulls a volume out of a compartment: Master Eco is looking for a book.
The 59-second sequence, staged at some point during his lifetime for a television portrait, has long since become iconic and has gone viral several times. As a book uncle who not only wrote world bestsellers about medieval monastery libraries (“The Name of the Rose”), but was also an extremely well-read scholar, Eco was as gratefully received in the world of the 1980s as he is today. At that time, television replaced books as the main medium. The society, which is mostly concerned with new media, needs places and mascots to make sure of what Eco formulates as follows: “The library is the symbol and reality of a collective memory.” And by that he doesn’t mean his own book collection, but the principle as such.
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Eco’s own private library no longer exists, at least not as a closed ensemble. The heirs bequeathed them to the Italian state, or more precisely to two research institutions, which will integrate them into their collections, where they can be made accessible to the public and preserved at the same time. Around 1,200 very valuable old books, which are antiques as objects, found their way into the collection of the Biblioteca Nationale Braidense in Milan. The approximately 30,000 other books came to the University Library of Bologna, the university where Eco had his legendary chair in semiotics – the study of signs – during his lifetime.
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In the beginning, filmmaker Davide Ferrario simply wanted to document Eco’s library again and create a cinematic monument to it. That in itself would have quickly become specialist, because the way Eco sorted his books (not alphabetically, but by sector), what he collected (for example serial novels from newspapers, a cultural tradition that existed from the 19th to the early 21st century) , what he was passionate about (occult sciences) and who he liked to read most (the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher) – all of this is interesting for the initiated, but not suitable for cinema in itself.
The Garden of Skeletons
Successful Ferrarios Doku by assembling various elements. In addition to Eco himself (from numerous recordings of television interviews, events, lectures – because he was a truly world-famous professor), his companions and his family, such as his German wife Renate Range, their daughter Carlotta and their son Stefano, also have their say. Honest appearance by grandson Emanuele, who was born in 2001: No, he has not yet read the book that his grandfather gave him, Gérard de Nerval’s romantic love story “Sylvie” from 1853. And yes, as a child it was fascinating and even scary for him to marvel at mysterious tomes from earlier centuries with his grandfather, such as the garden of skeletons in “Theosaurus Anatomicus” by Frederik Ruysch.
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
What runs through the film as a common thread is the idea that no area of interest or book topic can be too remote to find readers. In his youth, Eco admits that he mostly read adventure books. In contrast to non-joking scholars like Theodor W. Adorno, he never had a problem with mass taste and the culture industry. On the contrary: “Don’t let anyone tell you that we should only read important books read,” says Eco.
Between the cleverly composed original tones of Master Eco and his companions, filmmaker Davide Ferrario repeatedly mixes magnificent tracking shots which – musically accompanied by Carl Orff’s “popular” tones – provide insights into aesthetically sensational book temples: from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin to the Stuttgart City Library, from the St. Gallen Abbey Library to the Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City or Binhai Library in Tianjin, China. Message. To paraphrase Eco: Humanity is characterized by using books to communicate what is absent, what has been experienced in distant ages, and even what has been invented.
Speaking of which, do they necessarily have to be physical, printed books? At the end of his life, Master Eco also had an answer to this: “Papyrus rolls and manuscripts have survived for thousands of years. Books printed 500 years ago can still be as fresh as new today. But we don’t know how long our electronic data carriers will last. We don’t know because our computers today can no longer read what we stored on antediluvian floppy disks just a few decades ago.”
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