Review by Silvia Bahl | Programmkino.de | September 5, 2018
Media culture scholar Hans Puttnies uses footage from his own trip to Palmyra ten years ago as the starting point for a cinematic essay. The film questions both the supposed objectivity of historical scholarship and Western cultural notions of the Orient that are shaped by colonialist fantasies.
Palmyra long served the myth of the vanished city. As part of the Roman Empire and a border province, the city grew wealthy through trade routes. It housed temple complexes of unique cultural diversity, about whose precise purposes little secure knowledge exists.
In his commentary, Puttnies displays his archaeological fascination, yet critically breaks it open with references to the present. The ancient period forms only a small part of the history. After World War I, Syria fell under French protectorate; the Arab population was forcibly relocated to enable excavations for the Louvre. The nearby settlement of Tadmor later housed the largest torture prison of the Assad regime, where an estimated 20,000 people died.
The film contextualizes various temporal layers and shows, with simple cinematic means, how such a phantasmatic site emerges in cultural imagination and is authenticated by scholarship. Puttnies relies on the indexical power of photography and film to counter the longing images of Eurocentric art history.
The amateurish reportage character could be more polished, but does not detract from the informative substance. Puttnies assembles his varied material into seven chapters through his perceptive commentary, whose cultural-studies perspective is of great importance in current debates.
Germany 2017 | Director: Hans Puttnies | 90 minutes | Distributor: Kairos Filmverleih