PANORAMIS PARAMOUNT PARANORMAL. Three Times a Film

The picture of a mass dance scene in a fake forest, silent and slowed down, pursued by a camera gliding through the space, returns again and again in PANORAMIS PARAMOUNT PARANORMAL. Three Times a Film. The scene is from Marcel Carné´s surreal fantasy Juliette ou La clef des songes, which was created in the film studio of the small city of Saint-Maurice in 1951. These studio grounds near Paris, where for several years at the start of the sound film era, Hollywood´s Paramount Pictures company had different versions of the same scene produced in different languages, existed from 1913 to 1971. There is hardly a trace of the film industry left there today - a housing complex called Le Panoramis has replaced the film production site.

PANORAMIS PARAMOUNT PARANORMAL is about the past and present of this site, and is also concerned with a lot more: Constanze Ruhm and Emilien Awada slice into the history, to render something behind it visible, move one step further in thinking about the phantasmal element of their setting (and film history, per se), extending their poetic research to the nature of memory (and its loss) as well as the incomprehensible essence of that which we call acting. Up for disposition here is cinema itself, animalistically natural and rationally synthetic - as a reservoir of unconscious energy, as waking-dream phenomenon and moving phantom image.
A casting takes place for an imaginary film: there is a rehearsal of a scene sunken in a dream, which remains linguistically and theatrically indefinite between difference and repetition. Judith van der Werff and Caroline Peters present the very different intensities of their acting, the improvised "real" as well as the prepared "pretended." PANORAMIS PARAMOUNT PARANORMAL is a confidently orchestrated specter, a theory-imbued, psychoanalytically tinted fact-based fiction, pitting procedural against complete, text against visual work, found against fabricated: a Godardian knot that can´t be penetrated. (Stefan Grissemann)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt