The first feature of documentary filmmaker Claudia Alemann, Blind Spot (the literal translation of the title is “The Trip to Lyons”) was called by the Edinburgh Film Festival (where it premiered in 1980), “A visually fascinating film which is nevertheless one of the few real sound films ever made.” In it, a woman historian, fascinated by the diary of Flora Tristan, a nineteenth-century socialist feminist, searches for clues to Tristan's history, via an unconventional approach. Arriving in Lyons, she begins to record sounds around her - café talk, footsteps, her conversations with strangers - until, in a complex way, her own story begins to resonate with the “history” she seeks.
“In Blind Spot...(t)he processes of social change, instead of being read by academic detectives in stuffy archives, resound in a space between a sound and its always impossible, perpetually displaced but uncannily similar echoes....” --Edinburgh Film Festival