PHANTOM FOREIGN VIENNA

Austria 1991/2004 l 27 min l 35 mm (Blow up Super 8) l colour l German (with English subtitles)

Austrian Premiere: 21 January 2004 at Wien Museum Karlsplatz
World Premiere: International Film Festival Rotterdam 2004

Concept & Realisation: Lisl Ponger
Sound Design: Dietmar Schipek
Music: Hakan Gürses und Viennasi MC
Production: Amour Fou Filmproduktion
Producers: Gabriele Kranzelbinder, Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu
With the financial support of: ORF, Wien Museum Karlsplatz, BKA.kunst, Wien Kultur

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Exhibitions:
Summer 2008
Beyond Paradise
Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam
July 20th - September 7th, 2008

Performance and Mimicry
BodhiNewYork
July 25th - August 15th, 2008

Awards:
Golden Gate New Vision Award
San Francisco International Film Filmfestival 2005

Festivals:
Dissolvenze Film Festival Gradisca Special Program "Amour Fou Pour Vous" 30.11. - 4.12.2005
San Francisco 2005, San Francisco International Film Filmfestival, Golden Gate Awards, April 21 - May 5, 2005
Paris 2005 - 27th International Film Festival Cinéma du Réel, special program "Détour", March 4 - 13, 2005
Rotterdam 2004 - 33rd International Film Festival, Jan 21 - Feb 1, 2004
Diagonale 2004 - Festival of Austrian Film, March 3 - 7, 2004
Marseille 2004 - International Documentary Festival International, July 2 - 7, 2004
Melbourne 2004 - 53rd International Film Festival, July 21 - Aug 8, 2004
Neubrandenburg 2004 - dokumentART, Oct 5 - 10, 2004
Montréal 2004 - Festival International Nouveau Cinéma Nouveaux Médias, Oct 14 - 24, 2004


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. 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. At the same time she sets of with a certain daring on a discursive search for appropriate criteria with which to put these carnivalesque and exuberant images in order and simultaneously give the film a structure. Self- reflectively and ironically the commentary and the synchronised edited images run through all kinds of category from external factors (chronology of the takes) via thematic terms (cultural geography) to questions of form (colour, the relationship of light and shadow, film sound) not to mention "self-explanatory categories" (a Finn dressed as Santa Claus).

Finally this self-analysis leads to permanent (self-critical) digression in which every 'framing' of the foreigners is continued ad absurdum. At the same time a broad, differentiated spectrum of forms (dance, movements, clothing, masks etc.) spreads through this continuous slipping and sliding of categories, a consistent 'spectralisation' that makes the phantom neither more graspable nor more compliant.

Text: Christian Höller
Translation: Tim Sharp

A Taiwanese celebration, a Nigerian Harvest thanksgiving, a Turkish wedding, the official state holiday of the Ivory Coast, a Thai New Year, a Roma meeting, a Czech booze up. Almost every country, every culture, every ethnicity is represented in a large Middle European city such as Vienna, and has its own forms and conventions for preserving its identity. People meet each other in congress centers and backrooms, in restaurants and places of worship. In the years 1991 and 1992 Lisl Ponger undertook a systematic search for “Fremdes Wien” [Foreign Vienna]. She kept a diary of her encounters. Eleven years later she edited a film out of the material in which the results of her participatory observation (usually with a Super-8 camera, sometimes only with a tape recorder) are ordered according to different categories – visual and technical as well as “anthropological” motifs play a role. Off screen the filmmaker herself speaks the commentary about her ordering of cultural things, which she proves are simply "constructed" – a monk beats a drum, a river rushes by, the pictures and the sound come from two different areas. Phantom Foreign Vienna is a deconstruction of common “book illustrations of different peoples.” The focus of attention is not occupied by the characteristic gesture, the typical costume or the distinctive music (the proof of the essence of a group) but the multifarious forms of transition and montage. Representation becomes an open process, foreign Vienna remains, despite its nearness, a phantom.

Text: Bert Rebhandl
Translation: Tim Sharp