Miriam Bajtala: Becoming Outline

For a moment, father, mother and daughter freeze into a tableau vivant, imitating a painting. A voiceover narrates an episode from the life of the great-grandmother, who once went to France as a harvest labourer. Miriam Bajtala's Becoming Outline is an auto-ethnography, family constellation and multi-layered, complex self-portrait all rolled into one. The film traces the stages of the family's migration history - France, Czechoslovakia, Austria - and their social, psychological, financial and intellectual emancipation. Amateur actors act out scenes from the director's upbringing and adult life: Spitting cherry pits at a portrait of the General Secretary of the Communist Party as an act of political subversion; Christmas under a plastic tree in front of a paper nativity scene from the Kronen Zeitung newspaper; student forlornness in front of piles of books.

On a summery meadow, red textile tape traces the outlines of the 18 flats in which the director has lived in various places from Upper Austria to Canada. Despite all the precision of memory, the concrete spaces have become abstract environments for formative experiences - enigmatic, shame-filled, liberating. The expanse of the meadow around the outlines anticipates the escape from cramped conditions, sets emancipation in the picture before the narrative catches up with it.

In this way, Bajtala dissolves the distinction made in classical anthropology at the beginning of the film between ‘field’ and ‘home’: The director's preoccupation with herself and her family goes beyond the boundaries of an autobiography to become a systematic look at those structures that have shaped an individual (family) history. (Text: Fabian Tietke)

Miriam Bajtala (born in Bratislava) lives, sleeps and works mostly in Vienna. The themes of her artistic exploration revolve around perception, space, memory, (self-)empowerment, witnessing, representation and the power of poetry. Bajtala's works can be seen in exhibitions and at film festivals.