Review by Hannes Stein | INDIEKINO
Hans Puttnies, professor of media design from Darmstadt, spent two weeks in 2008 in the still-intact city of Palmyra. His newly edited essay film deals with European myth-making around the ancient city and how it „erased the living present of the Arab town of Tadmor.“
The film traces the perceptual history of Palmyra from a monk’s travel narrative of 1691, through Gerard Hofstede van Essen’s influential drawing, to James Dawkins‘ 1751 expedition. Giovanni Borra’s precise ruin drawings became design templates for 19th-century European country houses.
In the 20th century, German and later French archaeologists monopolized the research. In 1930, the French relocated the living population to a newly built town in order to enable better excavations.
Puttnies‘ work is characterized as „academic and occasionally pretentious“ but also as „a compelling study of aesthetic, enlightened European colonialism.“
Germany 2016 | Director: Hans Puttnies | 90 minutes | Distributor: Kairos Filmverleih | FSK: 16 | Release date: 06.09.2018