Travelling Shots – Notes on the Films by Lisl Ponger
By Tim Sharp
Viewing Lisl Ponger's films, one might be tempted to ask, as Lewis Carroll's Alice once did, "…but I wonder what Latitude and Longitude I've got to?" Almost all of Ponger's films and indeed, most of her photographic work, is concerned in some way with travelling. The sequences, from almost every country in the world, maintain their documentary nature even after the editing and re-working process. The end product, however, is never just about surfaces or recording events. Ponger makes use of structure and poetic associative montage so as to raise questions as to the nature of film itself or the function photographic or filmic representation has in reflecting and propagating cultural values.
Sometimes Substantial Shadows [1987] is about light, and thus about the essence of film itself; sometimes it is about darkness and film; most of the time the shadows seem more substantial than the light. People here have no personal identity, they are simply bearers of light in an underground darkness or members of a group participating in a procession or pre-Christian fire ceremony. Red-hot rails, slither dangerously along the edge of the frame, false suns open in the middle of the picture and release lethally hot metal. Light and heat, chemical and alchemical transformations follow one another across the screen. The purposeful architecture of an industrial complex or the historical solidity of a downtown building de-materialise, becoming, instead, join-the-dots ideograms. At the same time the process reveals the essential nature of filmic illusion and also, perhaps, a childlike sense of wonder at the power inherent in a beam of light cutting through the darkened auditorium to dance on the screen.
Souvenirs [1982] begins with a shot of what appears to be a maze-like edifice open to the sun. It is an unusual and exotic location with which to begin the film, and the knowledge that it is the ruins of the pre-Columbian town of Chan-Chan in Peru does not detract from its mysterious nature. Indeed, that is exactly the point. The camera has captured a 'souvenir' from an exotic land and the film goes on to show just how much collected images depend on the framework of interpretation accompanying our personal archives. The next shot, five young boys playing soldiers and posing for the camera, could also be seen as a statement about the scope and content of the film. Four of the five (all of whom have partial uniforms or home-made guns) try to line up, to present their military make-believe world (and themselves) to the camera. The manoeuvre does not progress far before the fifth, and largest, of the boys shatters the artificial reality with a shove. The theme of reality and representation appears throughout the film and is often linked to this sequence. (Real) soldiers on parade in Ecuador, some of them in wonderful blue uniforms reminiscent of nineteenth century toy soldiers. Others have modern combat uniforms and weapons but do not exhibit the expected 'military precision and bearing'. Shortly thereafter we are confronted with Nazi soldiers who then turn out to be actors in a film-in-progress, but seem, for a few seconds, more real and dangerous than the Ecuadorian recruits. Back in Quito, we may smile as the marching lines concertina, but the smile falters, unsure perhaps, of the reality in which we find ourselves.
Travelling and acquiring images; tourism and the construction of reality; film and its relationship to the occupation of territory with the lens, these are the themes which form the centre of the film. Capturing picturesque streets on film or shots of tourists in Florence making family album snapshots can be contrasted with one another. In the first case we are direct viewers of 'documentary' material exhibiting particular aesthetic qualities. In the second we are voyeurs of the process of making personal documents, the framing of personal realities. These elements are woven and re-woven together – the reality of the floods which glide past the lens, the sur-reality of rows of sharks mouldering in a studio back lot having done their duty in 'Jaws'; partial towns which have never been inhabited and aeroplanes which have never flown. The final shot makes the point again. A family stands in front of its well-tended shop, the photo slowly turns into a film, one reality and form of representation becomes another.
Semiotic Ghosts [1990] is the last film Ponger made with her own material, the first with sound and it deals with her personal iconography and definition of what film is, as well as having a haunting associative quality. The film begins in silence – white dresses swaying on a leafless tree and mirrored in black shadows on the ground then an orchestra dressed in white. A man rhythmically sharpening a scythe completes the introduction. The man moves to the top left-hand corner of the frame, the scythe turns, the film turns into a photograph and cut. Title. It is at this point the sound begins – an orchestra tuning up – and we are in one sense blind since there is no image on the screen. One can read the soundtrack as either chaos or as potential and impending order waiting to happen, an interpretation which would reflect the multiplicity of images in the film. These images contain darkness and light, allusions to alchemical processes of transformation, metaphors of projection, implications of voyeurism and reflections on time and space, in short, all the elements which go into making and viewing film – from chemical development to framing the scene – but above all they are concerned with the smallest image unit, the still, the photograph, the single frame. Time and again the film draws attention to this fact – after the man with the scythe, there is a street photographer, a knife thrower, a dart board and the tea sorters, all acting as punctuation in the narrative flow by becoming freeze frames. For the viewer it is also a journey, a quest, in the sense of travelling the world (from Austria to Oaxaca, San Diego to Sri Lanka) and in the sense of unraveling the signs and symbols it contains.
In Passagen [1996] the normality of the travel memories slowly begin to take on another dimension when we concentrate on the soundtrack. These accounts begin in Vienna. What is being described are individual stories of forced Jewish emigration from Austria, refugees fleeing from Nazi terror. The travelogue-like accounts coolly welded to family films of journeys taken for excitement and pleasure makes the private public and the public familial. It engenders a claustrophobic horror in the mind. But there is no respite. As the pictures wander the exotic places of the world they have become tainted with the knowledge from the soundtrack, the sensual pleasure freezes. At the point when you should be relieved at the escapes you remember those who didn't. At the same time you realise that there are other stories of flights from imprisonment and torture woven in and on their way back to Vienna. This time they are told by immigrants seeking safety in the West. Specifically in Vienna.
From the beginning, as the images of Deja Vu [1999] begin to parade across the screen, the viewer is seduced into their foreign but nonetheless eerily familiar flow. As with Passagen, these are documentary sequences of places and people but also of our longing for distant lands, colourful events and the 1001 star-pierced tropical nights which no camera can ever capture. It is perhaps only in retrospect that awareness dawns; that the film, consisting of amateur footage, is an archive of collective Western clichés of exotic Otherness. Geographical nonsense now dancing to another tune. These sequences may have been shot in all innocence but it is the innocence of unconscious complicity in Western cultural assumptions.
At the outset of the film, the sound effects work together with the images, enhancing their documentary character and colluding with the quasi-narrative flow. The courtship does not last very long. It is punctured in many places by something approaching unsettling irony. An example is the shot from the railing of a ship ploughing through southern seas. Sacred choral music wells up from the soundtrack. It has an emotional impact that sends a shiver down your spine. At the same time as it functions as 'film music', it has a narrative function and communicates significant information. The associations are manifold. 'Big ships' have visited these waters for hundreds of years, bringing Columbus, Cortez and Cook, but always bringing the missionary word and often the vessels of gun-boat diplomacy in their wake.
These correspondences occur frequently enough to be significant, and, in view of the rest of the soundtrack, act as life belts to be ignored at your peril because the second layer has a strong undertow. Real people telling true stories in a variety of languages and, as Bob Dylan would say, 'something is happening, but you don't know what it is'. The effect is such that it appears that part of the soundtrack has made a unilateral declaration of independence. It hasn't, instead it is hung like a curtain, making numerous points of contacts to what is happening on screen.
There are eleven native languages in Deja Vu, each reflecting a distinctive way of thinking and the cultural assumptions of those who speak them. Viewed historically, some of those languages (English, French, German, Portuguese) represent major export items – spreading the word with missionary zeal in the interest of the politics of power, economic efficiency and cultural presumption. In this post-colonial era we are still only half aware of the hierarchies which language creates. It is also worth considering the physical environment in which one watches the film. We are (willing) prisoners captured by flickering images. The soundtrack, however, turns us temporarily into colonial subjects. Fixed firmly in your seat you can escape neither the desire to understand, nor the improbability of having mastered eleven languages. This linguistic helplessness, coupled with possible annoyance or frustration, creates an emotional counterpoint to the seductive nature of the images and reproduces on a small scale the feelings of puzzlement and powerlessness which is the daily fare of the colonised.
By refusing to use sub-titles Deja Vu sails dangerous waters, but it never pretends innocence nor allows itself to be categorised. It simultaneously negates and confirms categories – narrative, experimental and documentary. Its centre of gravity is an issue – the way we structure what we see as knowledge in relation to other cultures and the way those structures, in turn, determine what we see. It is an invitation to dance between paradigms and like all good travel stories, the memory lingers.
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Courtesy of Sixpack Film
