An Incomplete Calendar

From Viennale

What an astonishing compendium! The genealogy and evolution of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries; a Venezuelan choir conducted by Teresa Jaén performing folk songs from the OPEC nations in their respective languages around the world during the 1970s; a theory of translation based on the premise of a common zone of language that allows one language to pass into another; a hypothesis about memory being captured in the sound of films; an admirably laborious exercise in microhistory which examines stamps, letters, publications and photographs from the period in question. All of this creates a gloss of a period in history when transnational solidarity existed and another notion of modernity for the countries of the Third World was glimpsed, one that was not a mimesis of European modernity. Can something like this be filmed? Sanaz Sohrabi’s exemplary essay shows the way: the heterogeneous materials are integrated into the always surprising mise-en-scène, which restores a historical era that illuminates areas of the present and interprets the past as a sediment of utopian memories at the service of a political imaginary aimed at emancipation. (Roger Koza)