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A, 1996, 35mm, 12 min
Regie/Director: Lisl Ponger
SprecherInnen/Narrators: Adi Sitzmann, Le Dinhan, Katharina Beer,
Vamira Vazquez,
André Mavazo, Fred Wander, Ana Schey, Maria Förster, N. I. Amra
P., Ornella Goria |
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A woman stands alone at the railing of a passenger liner and gazes
into the blue. She will remember for us an arrival in New York,
the walk of a young couple through China-town, the house boats
in Shanghai and the excited children who gather round the visitor
with the obscure picture machine. Beneath the pictures the sounds
of distant lands can be heard and, in parallel, a montage of various
memories and people unfolds. People who at some time either left
or arrived in Vienna involuntarily (...).
Lisl Ponger creates an imaginary map of the twentieth century
on which the stories of emigration are engraved like well-worn
tracks of occidental memory. The pictures, made by observant tourists,
are revealed, in their tensile relationship to the soundtrack,
as a post-colonial journey. A journey through exactly those countries
which long ago have been shrunk together in space and time. Finally
the wonderful neon signs of the Hotel Edison and Radio City
remind one of the origins of this form of appropriation of the
world, of the time of great expeditions, of Benjamin's shop-windows
and passages, and of the time when technical apparatus and means
of transportation fundamentally altered the perceptions of modern
man. |
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