Lisl Ponger´s photographic and cinematic work investigates the circumstances of places and their territorial occupation by the camera, the acquisation of images, the function of photographic and cinematic representation, and the presentation of cultural values. Her works are characterized by that which is no longer present, which refers to that which is already absent. This is a latent component of each of her images and at the same time the particular political stance of her works.
Passagen (1996) 11 min
A woman stands alone at the railing of a passenger liner and gazes into the blue. She will remember for us an arrival in New York, the walk of a young couple through China-town, the house boats in Shanghai and the excited children who gather round the visitor with the obscure picture machine. Beneath the pictures the sounds of distant lands can be heard and, in parallel, a montage of various memories and people unfolds. People who at some time either left or arrived in Vienna involuntarily.
Lisl Ponger creates an imaginary map of the twentieth century on which the stories of emigration are engraved like well-worn tracks of occidental memory. The pictures, made by observant tourists, are revealed, in their tensile relationship to the soundtrack, as a post-colonial journey. A journey through exactly those countries which long ago have been shrunk together in space and time. Finally the wonderful neon signs of the “Hotel Edison” and “Radio City” remind one of the origins of this form of appropriation of the world, of the time of great expeditions, of Benjamin‘s shop-windows and passages, and of the time when technical apparatus and means of transportation fundamentally altered the perceptions of modern man. (Christa Blümlinger)
In a sensitive gestus Lisl Ponger makes clear that, where images are concerned, neither hermetic memory nor immutable innocence exist and that found footage art requires no artificial manipulation to make the seam between privacy and hidden political agendas visible. (Robert Buchschwenter)
Lisl.Ponger.-.Passagen.1996.SUBBED.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi 
Déjà Vu (1999) 22 min
Somewhere in a subtropical country white visitors crowd around dark-skinned plantation workers emptying their harvest baskets. They look curious, as if wanting to test the quality of the tea leaves. Everywhere tourists take out their cameras — whether in front of large animals in the wild or camel riders, whether in the face of decorated human bodies or daily work routines.
Now and again they look into the camera themselves. For later, for when they will proudly show their "exotic" finds at home. This posing contains a model of western travels and picture making which is over a century old.
The fascinated gaze on the foreigners fixes them in pre-formed frames. Lisl Ponger follows the trail of that gaze by taking amateur found footage material and linking it together in new ways. She summons up atmospheric background sounds and adds a series of voices. With a subtle distance to the visual foreground, those people who are pictured in the west as much more homogenous than they are have the word — in the diverse languages of the "other". They tell, untranslated, of their experiences with various forms of colonialism — whether as subjects in their own countries or as the expelled and transformed "foreigner".
Lisl Ponger strings the shots together on a thread, a red one — both in the chromatic and symbolic sense. The sound helps these pictures from the continents of the southern hemisphere to resonate with narrative character. The voices are not allowed to domainate the images, but déjà vu takes a risk by letting the multiplicity of languages speak for themselves. It is a film which does not impart security but poses questions.
(Christa Blümlinger)
Lisl.Ponger.-.Deja.Vu.1999.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi Phantom Fremdes Wien (2004) 27 min
A Taiwanese celebration, a Nigerian Harvest thanksgiving, a Turkish wedding, the official state holiday of the Ivory Coast, a Thai New Year, a Roma meeting, a Czech booze up. Almost every country, every culture, every ethnicity is represented in a large Middle European city such as Vienna, and has its own forms and conventions for preserving its identity. People meet each other in congress centers and backrooms, in restaurants and places of worship. In the years 1991 and 1992 Lisl Ponger undertook a systematic search for “Fremdes Wien” [Foreign Vienna]. She kept a diary of her encounters. Eleven years later she edited a film out of the material in which the results of her participatory observation (usually with a Super-8 camera, sometimes only with a tape recorder) are ordered according to different categories – visual and technical as well as “anthropological” motifs play a role. Off screen the filmmaker herself speaks the commentary about her ordering of cultural things, which she proves are simply "constructed" – a monk beats a drum, a river rushes by, the pictures and the sound come from two different areas. Phantom Foreign Vienna is a deconstruction of common “book illustrations of different peoples.” The focus of attention is not occupied by the characteristic gesture, the typical costume or the distinctive music (the proof of the essence of a group) but the multifarious forms of transition and montage. Representation becomes an open process, foreign Vienna remains, despite its nearness, a phantom.
(Bert Rebhandl)
Lisl.Ponger.-.Phantom.Foreign.Vienna.2004.DVDRip.XviD-CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi Coming from my collection but ripped and shared by my friend 3p and cinemagrotesque group!
