Nursing an idea and a baby are the same not two different acts on simultaneously the same body

When dealing with Western theories about cinema, Plato’s allegory of the cave is hard to avoid.  According to it, what we as viewers see on the screen are always only shadows, representations, and dreams of a world whose reality is located elsewhere and is also more diverse. The Austrian Film Museum’s “Black Box,” the “invisible cinema,” aims to make it easier for audiences not to turn around to look for this reality, whose details shimmer representatively on the white wall. Christiana Perschon’s film, which is composed of just a few shots, plays with these established visual arrangements of the cinematic dispositif. In front of a white screen, her images ask: what reality of life opens up to an audience; or to no audience?

The film opens with a long shot of the empty audience space of the film museum. On the sound track are conversations between mothers and children. Shadows of mothers changing their babies on a table in front of the screen then become visible, followed by their illuminated bodies directly in front of the camera, with their shadows now behind them. A reversal of the gaze releases the unpaid care work played out in continuous shots before the  eyes of the film viewers from its shadowy existence. This thereby makes visible the reality of this work, for which filmmakers and theorists have historically hardly ever turned around in their metaphorical caves. The capitalized cinema space, which aims to stimulate reflection on the world, but at the same time, has a say in deciding what thoughts should have a space within it, is newly occupied.  Perschon brings together two socially separated spheres, spatially and visually, and also in her title: cultural and care work, performance and assistance become one through the person who carries them out—and are applauded when one of the many new diapers, in a long succession still to follow, is on snuggly. (Bianca Jasmina Rauch)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt