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Introduction |
Ulrike Ottinger came to filmmaking in the early seventies
via a career in the visual arts (painting, works on
paper, photography, performance). But she took her first
photograph at the age of nine, on a canal boat in Amsterdam
(two Indian gentlemen, one in a trench coat, the other
one wearing a turban with a well-tailored suit, smile
for the camera). Afterwards would come thousands of
images (photographs of course, but also collections
of postcards, cut-outs, illustrations and various iconographic
documents), constituting the open archive of a life
and an œuvre based on a principle of the collage
of images and events. Each image "refers to something
beyond itself: to the reality that precedes it; to countless
images from the repositories of the arts, of everyday
culture and of myth; and to the visual cosmos of her
own increasingly dense œuvre. These photographs
are encounters between things found and things invented.
They are arenas in which reality and fiction, past and
future, wish and fulfilment, transform each other."1
This artist book invites you on an accompanied stroll
among a selection of images introducing the complex
relation that the work of Ulrike Ottinger maintains
with the world, with history and culture. A long, beautiful
voyage, at once grave and enchanted, which from nearest
to furthest, from the urban landscapes of Berlin to
the steppes of Mongolia, from yesterday's tales to today's
decors, has nothing exotic or egotist about it. Rather
it involves a concern for the other and an "aesthetics
of diversity,"2 worthy of
another age.
This allegorical, Benjaminian aspect of her work is
what Eva Meyer has so marvellously underscored: "Her
films are ethnographic films, even on her own turf.
But without the claim to represent another or even one's
own culture. Ottinger knows very well that that's just
not possible. What fascinates her she ritualizes in
ephemera, without symbolic value, an artefact in other
words, one that can be as confusing as it is precise.
With this distinction we are where the experience of
the other becomes visible, where it can appear. In a
film that is about the fundamental impossibility of
appropriating this experience as the subject's self-realization.
The balancing act between Ottinger's despair and enthusiasm
is prompted by the impossibility and realizes the artifact
... That's what I keep on talking about, this allegorical
moment of distinction, which can be neither romantically
felt out nor replaced though a critical intention, but
which can be seen in the films of Ulrike Ottinger."3
Catherine David
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1 Katharina Sykora, Stills and Sessions,
in: Ulrike Ottinger, Berlin:
Contemporary Fine Arts, 2001.
2 Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An
Aesthetics of Diversity,
translation Yael Rachel
Schlick, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002
3 Eva Meyer, Ottingers Artefakt, in: Ulrike
Ottinger: Texte und Dokumente,
Kinemathek 86, Berlin,
Oktober 1995.
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