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“Passagen” Lisl Ponger In the film “Passagen” (“Passages”), the Vienna based artist and filmmaker Lisl Ponger, who regards ethnological research as part of her artistic work, has loosely superimposed two tracks of memories. Here film images and narratives conjoin topographies of tourism and emigration. The film shots are taken from amateur film material, and they not only reveal a fascination for exotic places, they are also equally typical for the tourist gaze. The kinds of travel images that Ponger makes the subject of much of her work “feed the collective imaginary of an audience at home with illustrative material for alterity” (Christian Kravagna). In “Passagen” it is the touristic, private remembrance images that allow a yearning for far-away places and the Other to emerge. At the same time, they are filled with implicit hierarchies and privileges. One becomes aware of this listening to the second track of memories, the soundtrack. These stories from different people refer to destinations other than the places that can be seen at the moment, so they are not synchronous with the images, and they imbue them with a dark significance. In part, one hears the same place names: Casablanca, Shanghai or New York, but also sentences like “Here in Nauders, it had to be possible.” Although it is not stated in the film, former Jewish refugees tell of their travel experiences as they were forced to flee from Vienna during the National- Socialist era. In this way, Ponger conjoins the two most opposite forms of journeying in the 20th century: tourism and forced emigration. How the image and the narration run counter to one another becomes especially evident when they touch, when the names of places shown before or afterwards are spoken, or when there is talk of the beauty of the sky and the water. Yet they remain tourist images on the one side and narratives of forced emigration on the other – an irreconcilability that reveals who speaks in which medium and whose and which images dominate the collective image memory. Filmmaker, born 1947, lives and works in Vienna. |
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