DOKU.ARTS
Zeughauskino Berlin
06.–23.10.2016

Ella Maillart – Double Journey 

Born in 1903, Ella Maillart’s first access to fame was as an Olympic sportswoman representing her native Switzerland in the fields of hockey, skiing and sailing. During the 1930s, and for the rest of her career, she became better known as an ethnographer, conducting daring journeys across Asia which she chronicled on film as well as in widely sold travel memoirs. 
 
The journey in Ella Maillart – Double Journey is “double” in two senses. It tells of an expedition to India undertaken on the eve of the Second World War that was split in the middle – the first part across Europe to Kafiristan, the second stage, a few months later, from Kabul to Delhi and on to Bombay, where she stayed with representatives of the British Raj going about their daily lives while anxiously waiting for political news from back home.  
 
But the documentary is “double” in another sense because for the first part of the expedition Maillart was accompanied by a friend and compatriot, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a woman of strong personality – a poet, photographer and observer in her own right. They were an unconventional pair (Schwarzenbach was a lesbian), thoroughly impatient with their bourgeois upbringing, and profoundly open to alternative anthropological horizons.
 
Lewinsky Sträuli and Bigini’s documentary draws extensively on the original rather wonderful film Maillart made on colour stock about her journey, supplemented by extracts from her diaries read out in voice-over by the French actress Irène Jacob. The resulting movie uncovers a fascinating chapter in the history of ethnographic exploration, undertaken at a moment when, thousands of miles away, European civilization was on the brink of the abyss.  

(mlf)