Die Reise nach Lyon
Overview
Elisabeth is married to a German and has a young daughter. She leaves her husband and child behind to trace the path of women’s rights activist Flora Tristan (1803–1844). The young, French historian takes the train to Lyon, where the early socialist spent the year before her death trying to create a Workers’ Union; ten thousand of them would later join her funeral procession. Elisabeth roams the streets and byways, using a Dictaphone to record the sounds of the city. Her goal is to reconstruct a sense memory of Tristan’s life, and in doing so, she finds the city to be an historical echo chamber: “Maybe I should have become a private detective”. During her research, stroller Elisabeth delves into different time periods. Her search for traces of history is an attempt to construct recorded history as a series of subjective recollections. And at this point in time, Blind Spot has itself become an historical documentation – in dolly shots and stills, the film “inhales” Lyon’s working class neighbourhood of La Croix-Rousse, which has today become the hipster district.