While on a multi-cultural journey round the world in the years 1991 and 1992 during which she never left the city of Vienna, Lisl Ponger
meticulously collected Super-8 sequences of celebrations, weddings and dances. The initial concern was with making visible the cultural multiplicity
which, from the point of view of their public presence in the city, simply didn’t exist. The return - a good ten years later - calls exactly that act
of visualization into question. "What am I really seeing?" asks the commentary, spoken by Ponger herself. But it is not only that which makes it clear
how conscious the film is with regard to the problems of how ethnicity is treated.
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It appears that in every act of ‘making visible’ there is a simultaneous and inevitable tendency to capture the flee(t)ing
and diasporic in fixed, stereotypical imagery as well.
In the process Ponger stages things on a number of ambiguous levels simultaneously. In the form of diary entries she shows that her
encounter with the ‘multi-culti’ Vienna of the early Nineties as profoundly subjective. Right from the beginning every form of objective
classification is rejected. |
