Cherchez la femme, they say. It sounds nice, but what this expression actually means is that woman is the root of all (male) problems, always to blame. Claudia von Alemann’s extraordinary Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon, 1980), recently restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek in cooperation with the Institut Lumière, is a rare film that puts the pursuit of a woman at its heart—not so that she can be punished, not so that a man’s troubles can be explained, but so that her achievements might be rescued from oblivion and might, in the process, change another woman’s life.
It is the story of Elisabeth, who abruptly leaves her partner and young daughter in Germany to travel by train to the French city of Lyon. When she arrives at her destination, she has her picture taken in a photo booth, as if seeking confirmation of her own existence. In the summer heat, she wanders near-empty streets in pursuit of Flora Tristan, the socialist feminist activist and writer who spent time in Lyon in 1844, just months before her death at age 41. Tristan roamed the country with the aim of organizing workers, calling on them to form a single trade union, while also campaigning for recognition of the fact that “woman is the proletariat of the proletariat.” Carrying with her a tape recorder, a notebook, and Tristan’s posthumously published diary, Elisabeth drifts across the cobblestones, unfettered by the demands of family life, subject to no will but her own. She runs into dead ends, kisses a stranger, sleeps in the daytime. “No one expects anything of me,” she says in voiceover. Is it a declaration of a freedom? Or the despair of feeling like the world has decided that she—a woman, a mother—will now bother with little beyond family?
