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Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon / Le voyage à Lyon), dir. Claudia von Alemann, West Germany 1981, 107 min., German & French with English subtitles, ©bpk / Abisag Tüllmann
The Essay Film Festival and Goethe-Institut London in collaboration with the ICA present the recent restoration of Claudia von Alemann’s 1981 feature-length film Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon / Le voyage à Lyon), a remarkable experiment in feminist historiography. In this film Elisabeth, a young German historian, roams the city of Lyon following in the footsteps of socialist and feminist writer Flora Tristan, and trying to reconstruct through sensations and sounds what Tristan might have felt and perceived in the past. The film is an exercise in historical reconstruction and a reflection about alternative ways of telling and writing women’s history.
In Die Reise nach Lyon, a woman historian, fascinated by the diary kept by Flora Tristan during the last few months of her life, refuses the traditional way of ‘looking’ at history and gets caught up in a complex, multi-layered pattern of reverberations. History and ‘her’ story become a network of resonances. One life/voice imprints in another. The process of social change, instead of being read by academic detectives in stuffy archives, resound in a space between a sound and its similar echoes. A visually fascinating film which is nevertheless one of the few real sound films ever made.
This screening will be followed by a conversation between Claudia von Alemann and Laura Mulvey.
This screening is part of a two-day programme dedicated to filmmaker Claudia von Alemann organised by the Essay Film Festival and the Goethe-Institut in partnership with the ICA on 8 and 9 April 2022. More information
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