The Tomb of Richard Burton

Spirits of love, death and poetry: a video-collage about Richard Burton in the face of his death. I choose to explore the internal, darker face of a Hollywood star using footage from his interviews and film performances. I did not know Richard Burton until my father showed me his grave not far from home, in the swiss countryside white and silent with winter. In a tiny forgotten cemetery rests a Welshman, once the most flamboyant actor one could meet in Hollywood. He named an enormous diamond after himself and Elizabeth Taylor whom he married twice. While today we still know Liz as an eccentric granny fallen out of her golden boozed years, I realized when talking with peers of my generation that the name of Burton only rings a vaguely familiar bell. I sought to explore the life of Richard Burton in the mirror of his death as he flirted with Her, and show the inner side of the star for whom he really was, a profound, perhaps misunderstood actor whose voice rose like “the deep, dark answer from the valley to everybody”. A moving and melancholic soul who loved liquor as much as poetry. It is a collage of archival footage where images take on a life of their own in a new structure of evocation.