In the beginning was a sky blue Isetta. In 1962, when Ulrike Ottinger was twenty years old and, according to the law in force at the time, not even of legal age, she drove to Paris in the sky-blue Isetta. That’s how she tells it at the beginning of her film “Paris Calligrammes”, which itself is a kind of calligram. A film-long story from her memories, illustrated with finds from archives, excerpts from her own films in which she later processed what she experienced, newly shot material and the documents she still has from her years in Paris. Her painting inspired by the Bandes dessinées, for example.
Ulrike Ottinger was born on June 6, 1942 in Konstanz, and in “Paris Calligrammes”, shot in 2018, you get a good idea that the soldiers in the French zone put Francophilia in her cradle. So she left, there was more to do with painting than filmmaking for her as soon as she went to Paris. And she takes us on a journey through time in small film snippets and pictures and chansons, it starts with “Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille”. Immigrants and Parisian intellectuals meet in Fritz Picard’s bookshop, and the young Ulrike Ottinger is not only allowed in, she is allowed to have a say. Sometimes the past wasn’t nearly as restrictive as one might imagine.
She was suspicious of the Paris riots of May 1968
You can see in her film why the sixties, with Paris in their midst, remained a place of longing, in which everything is a lively exchange, the fight against the ghosts of National Socialism and the beginning confrontation with French colonial history flow into one another. A spirit that she doesn’t find in the newly shot footage in the long since gentrified streets of yesteryear, but in giant hairdressing salons in today’s Parisian migrant districts.
Those were expendable times, in the Café de Flore she was allowed to hold on to her coffee all day and watch Simone Signoret read the script, and in the attic rooms she was initially unable to place the sounds of the awakening city until she realized that Paris was in the washed at dawn and dressed up for the day. It’s five o’clock, Paris wakes up – like in the chanson.
In 1969 Ulrike Ottinger returned to Germany, she remained true to art and made films, or rather: cinematic experiments. “Portrait of a Drinker” (1979) with a Greek choir, for example, or “Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Tabloid Press” (1984), in which only women play, from Veruschka von Lehndorff and Tabea Blumenschön to Barbara Valentin.
“Paris Calligrammes” is a story about how it came about, the joy of experimentation, the spirit of optimism and the precarious circumstances somehow belong together. Once, at the beginning of the film, she shows pages from Fritz Picard’s long-lost guest book, in which Hans Arp and Raoul Hausmann and Marcel Marceau had immortalized themselves alike, and describes how Situationists and Dadaists and intellectuals of different political convictions and national origins came together and united dialogue that the war had been able to interrupt but not destroy. There was hope, she says off-screen, “to bring a world that had been brutally unhinged back together”. Ulrike Ottinger, who turns 80 on June 6, was suspicious of the unrest in and after May 1968, the end of the lively exchange, in general: the end of something, not its beginning. She has moved on, always looking for a new one in the middle.