FILM
Ulrike Ottinger Goes Back in Time
Lesbian director looks to her youth, surrounding world
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Lesbian director Ulrike
Ottinger’s body of work
can be readily divided
into two parts. She began
making extravagantly campy,
experimental fi lms like “Freak Orlando”
and “Ticket of No Return”
when the New German Cinema
movement was in full swing. While
they feel much different from the
work of male colleagues like Hans-
Jürgen Syberberg and Werner
Schroeter, they draw on a similar
well of inspiration from opera and
avant-garde theater. In the ‘80s,
she developed a dual interest in
Asian culture and ethnographic
documentary. Her 1989 “Joan of
Arc of Mongolia,” which follows a
group of European tourists on a
train suddenly hijacked by Mongolian
warriors, mixes both strains
and marked the major turning
point in her work. She followed it
with a very different fi lm that still
grew from its shoot: “Taiga,” an
eight-hour documentary about
Mongolian nomads.
Her latest fi lm, “Paris Calligrammes,”
casts her eye for nonfi
ction back on the European culture
of her youth. After studying
art for several years in Munich, she
moved to Paris in 1962 and lived
there through the end of 1968.
“Paris Calligrammes” is explicitly
autobiographical work, but it’s
concerned with Ottinger’s artistic
development while leaving her personal
life off screen. (She mentions
Lesbian director Ulrike Ottinger’s “Paris Calligrammes”
going to gay bars in a section about
Paris nightlife, but otherwise does
not allude to her sexuality.)
At least at fi rst glance, the vision
of Paris offered in “Paris Calligrammes”
is drenched in nostalgia.
Ottinger gives the spectator
glamorously inviting black-andwhite
street scenes and views of
iconic cafés like Les Deux Magots.
She was able to take in the French
New Wave, attending screenings
at the Cinematheque Française
when that wave of cinema was still
new in the early ‘60s, while learning
from the experience of writers
and visual artists who had lived
through the ‘30s and ‘40s. She
hung out at the bookstore Libraire
Calligrammes, after which the fi lm
is named, and apprenticed herself
to Johnny Friedlaender in order to
develop her skills in etching. Her
style as a painter developed in a
colorful direction inspired by Pop
Art, with heavily stylized, cartoonish
FILM FORUM AND ICARUS FILMS
images that practically jumped
off the canvas.
“Paris Calligrammes” is organized
in short sections describing
one aspect of Parisian life. The
fi lm conveys a euphoria about the
possibilities of the ‘60s that’s extremely
familiar. So is Ottinger’s
Francophilia — to a certain kind
of cinephile, the section where she
describes getting her education in
silent German and Russian fi lms
at the Cinematheque Française
will sound like heaven. (Her mode
of conveying her nostalgia evokes
Chris Marker, although he never
would’ve used this fi lm’s style of
direct, fi rst-person narration.) But
the fi lm also tries to address the
grimmer aspects of ‘60s French
life.
As she moved there, France was
fi ghting with its colony, Algeria, for
independence. Alongside the hybrid
docu-fi ctions of Jean Rouch,
she praises a now-obscure documentary
about the desperate life
of Algerian immigrants in French
slums. On October 17, 1961, the
French police attacked a protest
march by Algerians, killing hundreds
of them and dumping their
bodies in the Seine. Ottinger fi nds
the marks of colonialism, not even
hidden, in the spaces presenting
the art she loved. She takes us
through a lovely outdoors gallery
featuring a sculpture celebrating
French imperialism. The Musée
de colonies, now renamed several
times, was even more brazen, with
its exterior decorated by art showing
African people as childlike innocents
giving up the wealth of
their countries to France out of the
kindness of their hearts. However,
she could have made an entire
documentary about this intersection
of art and colonialism; the
20 minutes “Paris Calligrammes”
devotes to the subject seem somewhat
cursory.
Despite acknowledging the necessity
of the May ’68 rebellion,
Ottinger quickly became disgusted
by its actual events, describing it
here as a case of naïve youth being
co-opted by communist extremists
and taking things too far. She
was so angry that she went back
to Germany, although she soon returned
to Paris to make her fi rst
fi lm (with philosophers Louis Althusser
and Pierre Bourdieu and
the great Dada artist Max Ernst in
the cast.)
The New German Cinema movement
happened to coincide with
Stonewall and the start of queer
liberation around the world. Thus,
its fi gurehead was the bisexual
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and
fi lmmakers like Ottinger, Schroeter
and Rosa von Praunheim were
able to participate in it as out gay
men or lesbians. Ottinger’s early
fi lms seemed inspired by a very
leftfi eld form of second wave feminism
in their defi ance of realism
— and, often, storytelling itself
— to sidestep conventional, sexist
depictions of women. “Paris Calligrammes”
reveals the roots of her
ideas. For her, cinema was always
just one infl uence out of many.
This documentary shows how
specifi c images from Goya and
Moreau paintings made their way
into their fi lms, while the stylization
of her early work looks like an
extension of her visual art. Now
78, Ottinger has come full circle,
looking back at her early development
as an artist and, crucially,
the impact of the world around
her.
PARIS CALLIGRAMMES | Directed
by Ulrike Ottinger | Icarus
Films | Available in English voiceover
or German voiceover with English
subtitles | Streaming through Film
Forum | Filmforum.org
MAY 6 - MAY 19, 2 36 021 | GayCityNews.com
/Filmforum.org
/GayCityNews.com
