Guest
a provocative, smart, yet woefully underappreciated debut film by the german writer-director claudia von alemann, a contemporary of chantal akerman and helke sander, blind spot rekindles the forgotten history of flora tristan, the 19th-century french-peruvian socialist and feminist (and grandmother of paul gauguin), through the experiences of elisabeth, a quixotic scholar who leaves her husband and young daughter in germany in the hope of finding meaningful traces of tristan’s writing and activism in lyon, the french city where she spent her final months before her death in 1844 at age 41. as elisabeth wanders the streets alone, her tape recorder capturing the sounds of the present to divine untold stories of the past—“i want to imagine what [tristan] might have heard, seen, or felt,” elisabeth notes. “colors, noises, all of that....”—von alemann herself reflects on cinema as a tool of subjective sensory experience, history writing, and political action.
