Lyon, France, grew rapidly as the silk industry developed there after the Industrial Revolution. In 1831, immediately after the July Revolution, the Louis-Philippe regime dispatched forces to arrest and suppress canuts, the silk workers. The canuts nevertheless refused to yield.
In the summer of 1978, Elisabeth, a German woman majoring in history, leaves for Lyon, where Flora Tristan, a 19th century socialist who studied labor and women’s movements in Europe and Latin American, stayed in the last year of her life. Keenly aware of a blind spot in the existing history research methodology dealing with literature representing Tristan’s activities, Elisabeth longs to learn and experience Tristan’s senses with her whole body and to transfer the following affect into actions. Collecting bird songs, children’s cheers and the sounds of the river and machinery in Lyon, Elisabeth tries to hear Tristan’s time again. With the private memory of her daughter, she meets Lyon as a living place, not a historical relic.
Lyon was also a primary stage of the resistance during World War II, as shown in many films, including Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956). Facing the memory of Shoah in Lyon, Elisabeth seems to be a sister of Anna who traces the memory of her mother, a Holocaust survivor in Chantal Akerman’s Meeting with Anna (1978). [SHIN Eun-shil]