| 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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