Light play art work and linguistic art work.: On the function and role of films in the work of Gerhard!Roth

This article examines the multi-layered interrelations between Gerhard Roth writings and film. It charts the corresponding relationship of his early books to their accompanying television documentaries. The main focus of this essay however is on the film adaptations of Stille Ozean (1980) and Landlaufiger Tod (1984), the two major novels in his cycle Archive des Schweigens. Supplemented by a look at the two radically different adaptations of his volume of topographical essays on Vienna called Eine Reise in das Innere von Wien (1991), the article also provides a summary overview of the seven dramas written by Roth for Austrian television in the 1990s, some of which were directed by his son Thomas. Finally, Roth approach to the medium of film is being discussed by drawing on the 59 reviews he published between 1995 and 1997 as a film critic for the Austrian magazine NEWS.