BLIND SPOT

In Blind Spot, a woman historian
fascinated by the diary kept by the
nineteenth-century utopian socialist
feminist, 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. A visually
fascinating film, but nevertheless one
of the few real sound films ever made.

“l have been interested in
nineteenth-century women -
especially feminists - for many years.
ln this film, however, I was concerned
with more than just the reconstruction
of a historical personage; also with
questions of how one can possibly
track down a person from another age,
how memory relates to history, and
how women remember. These various
questions emerged from my work on
the film and caused me to modify my
original conception considerably. The
original script already deviated from
tradition by making use of the sort of
collage technique found in the novels
of Anna Seghers and John Dos Passos,
for example. its underlying structure
was nonetheless architectonically
traditional: it had a beginning, a
dramatic climax and an end; the
twelve-year period in Flora Tristan's life
was presented chronologically; the
costumes and decor were historically
accurate, and so on. At a certain point,
however, I began to question this ,
conception. The form reinforced the
notion that a film attempting an
authentic historical reconstruction
must necessarily represent the
historical truth. Yet it was precisely this
notion that I wanted to call into
question. I decided that this position
had to determine the very form of the
film itself, rather than exist outside of
and behind it.

I therefore replaced the original
chronological conception with a
kaleidoscope of short, sell-enclosed
sequences. More importantly, I shifted
the focus from the historical personage
to a contemporary woman, and the
relationship of her life to her almost
obsessive attempt to reconstruct
Tristan's...

Because the relationship to the
reconstruction of the past remains
central, the film remains a historical
one. The woman who undertakes the
search for the lost Flora Tristan is a
former historian who has very
consciously broken with her academic
past. Her experience has made her
mistrustful of traditional modes of
transmitting historical knowledge. She
has found the diary of the nineteenth-
century woman and would like to
uncover traces of her but isn't sure
how. And that is precisely what
concerns me: how does remembering,
forgetting, re-remembering function?
However, I didn't want to construct a
simple antithesis between intellectual
and naive modes of appropriating
history. That would be too simple, and
would fit too well into a male-
determined scheme. That is why I had
the woman, Elisabeth, reject the
intellectual mode that she herself had
mastered. The question then becomes
the possibility of other forms of
perception and reconstruction - forms
which still have to be developed ...

Apart from the diaries of Flora and
Elisabeth, the most important medium
in my film for reconstructing the past is
sound. Using a cassette recorder, the
woman tries to discover sounds that
people in 1844 could have heard. She
does go to Lyon, where Flora Tristan
worked towards the end of her life. But
then she follows paths that she
imagines the historical person could
have taken. She expends a great deal
of energy in the form of ‘phantasy work'
which is demanded from the spectator.
The film frequently collides with the
pubIic's audio-visual expectations. The
searcher frequently goes up dead-
ends - what I would call positive dead-
ends - which lead away from Flora
Tristan's life but lead to her own life,
and the lives of others she encounters.
A decisive role in this search is played
by the trail of sounds she follows.
Remembering is largely effected
acoustically. I have tried to make a
sound film in which sound is neither a
mere background nor the means by
which an illusion of authenticity is
induced. I use many sound elements in
order to transmit differentiations in
hearing. Just as one can speak of
‘subjective camera‘, I would like to
speak ofthe ‘subjective microphone‘."

Claudia von Alemann