PANORAMIS PARAMOUNT PARANORMAL
Constanze Ruhm & Emilien Awada
AT/DE/FR 2017, 55'

The film studios in St. Maurice, near Paris, are central to PANORAMIS PARAMOUNT PARANORMAL. Founded in 1913, the studios were used by Hollywood giant Paramount to produce multiple-language versions of films at the very beginning of the sound film era. Today, there is barely any trace of the world of cinema to be found. The studios were destroyed by fire in 1971 and a modern housing estate, Le Panoramis, was later built on the site. Images and sound from films made in St. Maurice appear; the theme of the forest returns again and again as visual motif. A casting scene for Marcel Carnés surreal fantasy Juliette ou la clef des songes from 1951 is restaged with two actors (and a couple of birds) auditioning for an imaginary film. Constanze Ruhm and Emilien Awada’s reflections on the nature of memory and oblivion not only evoke the phantasmal elements of the past and present of the place, but also of the history of cinema itself. “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)