Becoming Outline

At the beginning of Miriam Bajtala's Becoming Outline, we are told that in classical anthropology, field and and home are distinct spheres of knowledge. In the filmmaker’s exploratory confrontation with her own (family)history, however, the two coincide—distance and familiarity, objectivity and interconnectedness, rational understanding and affective involvement. The film attempts a productive confrontation along the spaces in which the artist has lived in Slovakia, Austria, Canada, and Central America; the translation of a subjectively experienced life into an artistic form in which—as the narrator/researcher who inhabits the soundtrack explains to us at the end—“the rift turns into an experience.”

Without allowing the deeply personal to become navel-gazing of the private and innermost, Becoming Outline creates a cinematic form that describes the dimensions of class, nation, and gender as elements of a personal experience, personal socialization, and personal constitution. The film contrasts these discursive, political, historical spaces with the emergence of a freer “room of one’s own” (Viginia Woolf). Film and performance, images and voices, fiction and documentary, signs and affects mesh seamlessly, thus weaving apartments with sports halls, border stations with hotels, teachers’ and authors' rooms, only to lead them back again and again to a literal field where they are newly arranged. The encounter with this form could be described as an involved/involving abstraction, which demands empathy only to the extent that it does not disable the leeway that allows the viewer to transfer it to their own lives. (Alejandro Bachmann)  

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt