| Long before the term "postmodern"
began to haunt the vocabulary of literary and art critica,
Ottinger made her first films in which names like Tristan
Tzara und Josephine de Collage stood in strange contrast
to characters called Betty Brillo or Flora Tannenbaum.
Playing with the conventions of modernism and the classical
avantgarde is one of the permanent features of Ottinger's
work, which in its earlier manifestations is also marked
by a lack of narrative content. But while her playfulness
is "witty and sarcastic", as Patricia Highsmith
aptly observed, it is also always "somehow romantic".
It counters the increasing domestication of modern life
with the desire and the invention of the strange.
If recent technological means of communication and
transportation annuled space and time, if the media
and tourism have turned the whole world into everybody's
front yard, Ottinger's films are intent on reconstituting
distance and difference. This position originates
in the insight that the ideal of homogeneity is fundamentally
related to the fear of otherness, in other words,
amalgamating and making the same is the other side
of the coin of casting out and excluding. What is
so striking about Ottinger's work is an attitude that
brings about the exact opposite effect: the insistence
on difference based on inclusiveness.
Crucial to this attitude is the acceptance of the
other in oneself, one's dreams, desires and fantasies.
Reality in Ottinger's films pays equal attention to
the everyday and the imaginative, to conscious actions
and unsconscious motives, and to all forms of marginal
expression, which has earned her the title of "queen
of the Berlin underground." While this is undoubtedly
justified, it also misses the point. Ottinger's project
as a whole does not aim at being marginal but rather
to bring the margin into the center, or de-centering
the mainstream by introducing the margin on an equal
basis.
Her more recent interest in documentary film has
made this broader perception of herself as artist
abundantly clear. The increase in narrarivity in her
feature films can also be seen in this light as an
attempt to achieve greater accessibility. At no time,
however, has this dialogue with the audience turned
into concessions to the market.
The narrativity of her films is essentially that
of the fairy-tale in the sense that reality enters
obliquely into a world of fantasy. However, the traditional
fairy-tale's gendered role distribution is usually
ignored if not reversed. This is not surprising given
the fact that gender is one of the major criteria
for exclusion. Perhaps it was prophetic, perhaps simply
a confident forecast that Ottinger introduced her
first film with the words:
"Fairy tales are coming
Fairy tales are here to stay
I am a picture
I am a fairy tale
And this is the sound of music
This is Laocoon and Sons
Laocoon and Sons is a story for all seasons.
One or two or three or hundred voices tell this story
For the pleasure of your eyes and ears.
These are womens's voices."
Another reason why the fairy-tale such an exellent
vehicle to mediate Ottinger's films is that its thematic
building blocks can easily accommodate and often reflect
upon most of Ottiner's elements. This is certainly
the case in the attempt to relate her grand themes
of exclusion and inclusion to her earlier concern
with transformation and metamorphosis. As in legends
and myths, in fairy-tales the quest of the hero /
ine quite frequently aims at a metamorphosis (from
Cinderella to princess, from frog to prince etc.)
that is followed by an act of integration into society.
Yet, integration in Ottinger's stories is never an
act of conforming to social standards. It is more
closely related to the magic that inheres in the transformations.
This magic is a result precisely of Ottinger's equivocation,
or, it might be better to say, purposeful equation
of the products of imagination, dreams, fantasies,
stories etc., and what is commonly called reality.
The style appropriate to this attitude is not a linear
building up to a point of tension and then resolving
it, but a leisurely episodic pace that lingers over
details until they are as magnificent as the grand
vistas. It traverses genre distinctions to such a
degree that document very often vanishes into fiction
and vice versa and it tntrudes on time and action
by giving equal space to a reflecting meta-level of
quotations and an endlessly receding hall of mirrors
that constitutes not only the connection tissue of
each separate film but the fabric of her entire production.
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