Review by Arno Raffeiner | Der Freitag | September 16, 2018
In parallel to other film releases, Hans Puttnies‘ essay film „Palmyra“ opened in cinemas. It documents the destruction of ancient ruins by iconoclasts and analyzes how cultural warfare always also damages culture itself. The film connects archaeological history with political oppression — the largest prison for political detainees stood not far from the ruins.
Puttnies‘ film treats loss and absence as a catastrophic underlying condition. The Syrian civil war remains present without explicitly being centered. Palmyra’s ancient sites are understood not only as cultural heritage, but as the stage of a multi-layered history of possession, appropriation, and destruction.
The film shows how cultural heritage is instrumentalized — by 18th- and 19th-century European colonizers as well as by ISIS in the 21st century. In both cases, the stones do not serve the understanding of the people who lived there, but rather the colonizers‘ own ideological purposes.