Review by Bianka Piringer | kino-zeit.de | July 25, 2018
Documentary filmmaker Hans Puttnies visited the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria with his camera in 2008. His essay film, completed in 2017, not only seeks to preserve the former appearance of the ruined city, but also critically questions the Western concept of culture.
Western interest in Palmyra, which once belonged to the Roman Empire, began in the 18th century with research expeditions. To facilitate systematic excavations for European museums, the inhabitants of Palmyra were relocated and the nearby town of Tadmor was founded. Puttnies criticizes the one-sided cognitive interest of Western researchers, focused on the intellectual reconstruction of antiquity.
The film shows that early inhabitants knew around 60 deities, yet apart from column inscriptions hardly any written records of daily life exist. The beautiful gateways do not reveal that Christians and later Muslims built their places of worship in the temples, nor do they tell of people who lived here without leaving historical traces.
During filming, Puttnies met the 15-year-old Bedouin Mohamad, a souvenir vendor. According to the press kit, he was later tortured by ISIS but escaped to Denmark.
The film uses ISIS propaganda videos that document both the destruction of Palmyra and lethal atrocities. Puttnies largely dispenses with original sound and relies instead on his contemplative voice-over commentary and experimental electronic music. This formal choice creates distance from the object and signals that the gaze itself estranges it.
However, the film does not completely break with the Western tradition. People are rarely placed at the center; aside from Mohamad, no local resident speaks. Puttnies talks about people, not with them, and so the chance to show the place as a living environment is missed. By emphasizing the essayistic, he points to the subjectivity and partiality of his contemplative cultural-historical journey.
In the summer of 2015, the terror militias of the „Islamic State“ destroyed the famous temples of Palmyra. The Assad regime then bombed the modern town of Tadmor next door and turned the families that had lived off the monuments into refugees in Europe.