Open Ticket
One of the most surprising things about Ulrike Ottinger’s new documentary Paris Calligrammes is how accessible it is. Some cinephiles may be familiar with Ottinger based on an 11-year period of mostly fictional productions that were adjacent to the New German Cinema but, for various reasons, were never entirely subsumed within that rubric. Others are quite possibly more aware of her later work in documentary, in particular her commitment to a radical form of experimental ethnographic cinema. In either case, Ottinger’s films, often difficult to see in the first place, are extremely demanding, in terms of their duration, their bizarre narrative and performance styles, or some combination thereof.
However, Ottinger’s new film is a different sort of animal. It’s biography as intellectual history, and although it explains quite a bit about where Ottinger and her work came from, Paris Calligrammes is also about a much wider milieu of postwar French creativity. It shows why thinking of Ottinger as a German filmmaker, or a feminist and/or queer artist, while not inaccurate, cannot fully explain Ottinger’s overall project. Context is everything, and one of the great benefits of Paris Calligrammes is that it helps us understand Ottinger and her work within a much broader frame.
It’s not often that an artist provides such a thoughtful, comprehensive genealogy of her own creative development. Certain of Agnes Varda’s late works, or select essay films by Godard or Welles, are similarly revealing, if much less linear. Ottinger, quoting Claude Lévi-Strauss, argues that to accurately analyze one’s culture, it is necessary to view it like an outsider. While Paris Calligrammes is unavoidably personal, it avoids sentimentality and hews close to the facts. Ottinger looks at her own history in much the same way that a critic might, providing insights and drawing connections while largely staying out of her own way. She was both participant and witness to major artistic and political upheavals in ’60s Paris, and she takes us through those changes rather systematically.
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