Ulrike Ottinger
24 - 29 Feb 2020
ULRIKE OTTINGER
24 – 29 February 2020
On the occasion of the world premiere of Paris Calligrammes and Ulrike Ottinger being honoured with the Berlinale Camera, CFA is showing a selection of works: paintings, tapestries and photos from the 1960s in Paris.
In a rich torrent of archival audio and visuals, paired with extracts from her own artworks and films, Ottinger resurrects the old Saint-Germain- des-Prés and Latin Quarter, with their literary cafés and jazz clubs, and revisits encounters with Jewish exiles, life with her artistic community, the worldviews of Parisian ethnologists and philo- sophers, the political upheavals of the Algerian War and May 1968, and the legacy of the colonial era. “I followed the footsteps of my heroines and heroes,” Ottinger narrates. “Wherever I found them, they will appear in this film too.”
,,In 1962, as a young artist, I came to live and work in Paris. That period until 1969, when I left the city, was not only one of the most formative for me, it was also an era of intellectual, political, and social upheaval in modern history. The film PARIS CALLIGRAMMES combines my personal memories of the 1960s with a portrait of the city and a social cartography of the age. Like Guillaume Appolinaire’s poetry collection Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (Caligrams: Poems of Peace and War), I have given it the form of a filmic “picture-poem” (calligram) in which the words and images, complemented by language, sound, and music, form a mosaic that emerges from the vivacity of those exciting years while speaking to the fragility of all cultural and political achievements. The Ariadne thread through the film is a walk across Paris with many stops where topics are raised out of any chronological order. In the tradition of the flâneur, I visit focal points in the city that were meaningful to me personally and to the story of the 1960s, sites where significant political events transpired, important cultural and artistic encounters occurred, and new communal ways of life evolved. Not only was Paris in that time a “melting pot” of intellectuals and artists from all over the world, it was also undergoing the difficult political era of decolonization. The War in Algeria, and later the Vietnam War, over-shadowed the period of reawakening after the Second World War and brought people from the colonies and political conflicts into the capital. Thus my friendships that developed in those years were so internatio- nal and colorful, so exciting and intense.” (Ulrike Ottinger)
https://www.zeroone.de/en/movies/paris-calligrammes/
Paris Calligrammes
Berlinale Special
Saturday, February, 22
4:15 pm
Haus der Berliner Festspiele
Berlinale Kamera to Ulrike Ottinger and film talk
Sunday, February 23
5 pm
Thalia Programmkino (Potsdam)
Monday, February 24
12:30 pm
Cubix 6
https://www.berlinale.de/en/programme/programme/detail.html?film_id=202001981
Awards
Jan 28, 2020
Berlinale Camera 2020: Tribute to Ulrike Ottinger
Since 1986, the Berlinale has awarded the Berlinale Camera to honour personalities and institutions who have made a special contribution to filmmaking and with whom the festival feels closely connected. In this manner, the Berlinale expresses its appreciation towards those who have become friends and supporters of the festival.
At the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, the director and artist Ulrike Ottinger will be honoured with the Berlinale Camera.
In the 21st century, cinema is becoming an art-form disconnected from reality. Image and sound find their definitive forms in laboratories, and they often distort what had actually been said. The Executive Director Mariette Rissenbeek and the Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian on awarding Ulrike Ottinger: “With the Berlinale Camera, we celebrate artists whose work has always maintained a close relationship between the subjects which comprise cinema and the act of ‘film-making’ itself. In light of this, Ulrike Ottinger is the ideal recipient of an award that bears the word ‘camera’. As a painter, a photographer, an all-round artist, she has always regarded cinema as a form of art which is created and crafted by meeting other people, objects, books, stories, places, sets in which reality makes itself felt. Her latest film Paris Calligrammes is a beautiful autobiography and a captivating journey through time.”
The Berlinale Camera will be awarded to Ulrike Ottinger on Saturday, February 22, at 4.15 pm in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The world premiere of Ottinger’s documentary Paris Calligrammes will be presented afterwards in the Berlinale Special.
“A big thank you for such a wonderful prize. Hopefully a miracle will come out of this and my wish that my script will be transformed into a film with moving pictures will be fulfilled,” says Ulrike Ottinger.
Ulrike Ottinger has been one of the most important German filmmakers since the 1970s. In addition to the Berlinale, her films have been shown at numerous international festivals and have received various recognitions, including at the Cinémathèque française in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ottinger's film work comprises 25 short, documentary and feature films. She was awarded the Deutsche Filmpreis (Federal Film Prize) and repeatedly received the German Film Critics Award. In 2011, the Hannah Höch Prize of the City of Berlin was bestowed upon her for an outstanding artistic life’s work. This encompasses not only film, but also theatre directing, painting and photography. Her artistic work has been shown at the Biennale di Venezia, the documenta and the Berlin Biennale.
Ulrike Ottinger initially worked as a freelance artist in Paris before she directed with Tabea Blumenschein in 1972-73 her first film Laokoon & Söhne (Laocoon & Sons). She then moved to Berlin, where she still lives today. Beginning in 1979, she realised her “Berlin Trilogy”: Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Portrait of a Female Drunkard. Ticket of No Return), Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press). A series of long documentaries followed, such as China. Die Künste – Der Alltag and Taiga, works which were created when travelling through Asian countries. In Countdown she applied a comparable ethnographic perspective to a Berlin between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification. In her longest documentary so far, Chamissos Schatten (Chamisso’s Shadow) from 2016, Ulrike Ottinger embarks upon a voyage for several months, tracing the course of Adelbert von Chamisso through the Bering Sea.
Chamissos Schatten is just one of a dozen of Ottinger’s films which were invited to the Berlinale during her career. The majority ran in the Forum, Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia (Joan of Arc of Mongolia) competed in the Competition in 1989. Her first Berlinale contribution, Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse from 1984, ran again last year in the context of the Retrospective “Self-determined - Perspectives of women filmmakers”.
The Berlinale Camera consists of 128 individual parts and depicts a real film camera. It is manufactured by the Düsseldorf goldsmith and artist Georg Hornemann.
Press Office
January 28, 2020
24 – 29 February 2020
On the occasion of the world premiere of Paris Calligrammes and Ulrike Ottinger being honoured with the Berlinale Camera, CFA is showing a selection of works: paintings, tapestries and photos from the 1960s in Paris.
In a rich torrent of archival audio and visuals, paired with extracts from her own artworks and films, Ottinger resurrects the old Saint-Germain- des-Prés and Latin Quarter, with their literary cafés and jazz clubs, and revisits encounters with Jewish exiles, life with her artistic community, the worldviews of Parisian ethnologists and philo- sophers, the political upheavals of the Algerian War and May 1968, and the legacy of the colonial era. “I followed the footsteps of my heroines and heroes,” Ottinger narrates. “Wherever I found them, they will appear in this film too.”
,,In 1962, as a young artist, I came to live and work in Paris. That period until 1969, when I left the city, was not only one of the most formative for me, it was also an era of intellectual, political, and social upheaval in modern history. The film PARIS CALLIGRAMMES combines my personal memories of the 1960s with a portrait of the city and a social cartography of the age. Like Guillaume Appolinaire’s poetry collection Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (Caligrams: Poems of Peace and War), I have given it the form of a filmic “picture-poem” (calligram) in which the words and images, complemented by language, sound, and music, form a mosaic that emerges from the vivacity of those exciting years while speaking to the fragility of all cultural and political achievements. The Ariadne thread through the film is a walk across Paris with many stops where topics are raised out of any chronological order. In the tradition of the flâneur, I visit focal points in the city that were meaningful to me personally and to the story of the 1960s, sites where significant political events transpired, important cultural and artistic encounters occurred, and new communal ways of life evolved. Not only was Paris in that time a “melting pot” of intellectuals and artists from all over the world, it was also undergoing the difficult political era of decolonization. The War in Algeria, and later the Vietnam War, over-shadowed the period of reawakening after the Second World War and brought people from the colonies and political conflicts into the capital. Thus my friendships that developed in those years were so internatio- nal and colorful, so exciting and intense.” (Ulrike Ottinger)
https://www.zeroone.de/en/movies/paris-calligrammes/
Paris Calligrammes
Berlinale Special
Saturday, February, 22
4:15 pm
Haus der Berliner Festspiele
Berlinale Kamera to Ulrike Ottinger and film talk
Sunday, February 23
5 pm
Thalia Programmkino (Potsdam)
Monday, February 24
12:30 pm
Cubix 6
https://www.berlinale.de/en/programme/programme/detail.html?film_id=202001981
Awards
Jan 28, 2020
Berlinale Camera 2020: Tribute to Ulrike Ottinger
Since 1986, the Berlinale has awarded the Berlinale Camera to honour personalities and institutions who have made a special contribution to filmmaking and with whom the festival feels closely connected. In this manner, the Berlinale expresses its appreciation towards those who have become friends and supporters of the festival.
At the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, the director and artist Ulrike Ottinger will be honoured with the Berlinale Camera.
In the 21st century, cinema is becoming an art-form disconnected from reality. Image and sound find their definitive forms in laboratories, and they often distort what had actually been said. The Executive Director Mariette Rissenbeek and the Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian on awarding Ulrike Ottinger: “With the Berlinale Camera, we celebrate artists whose work has always maintained a close relationship between the subjects which comprise cinema and the act of ‘film-making’ itself. In light of this, Ulrike Ottinger is the ideal recipient of an award that bears the word ‘camera’. As a painter, a photographer, an all-round artist, she has always regarded cinema as a form of art which is created and crafted by meeting other people, objects, books, stories, places, sets in which reality makes itself felt. Her latest film Paris Calligrammes is a beautiful autobiography and a captivating journey through time.”
The Berlinale Camera will be awarded to Ulrike Ottinger on Saturday, February 22, at 4.15 pm in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The world premiere of Ottinger’s documentary Paris Calligrammes will be presented afterwards in the Berlinale Special.
“A big thank you for such a wonderful prize. Hopefully a miracle will come out of this and my wish that my script will be transformed into a film with moving pictures will be fulfilled,” says Ulrike Ottinger.
Ulrike Ottinger has been one of the most important German filmmakers since the 1970s. In addition to the Berlinale, her films have been shown at numerous international festivals and have received various recognitions, including at the Cinémathèque française in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ottinger's film work comprises 25 short, documentary and feature films. She was awarded the Deutsche Filmpreis (Federal Film Prize) and repeatedly received the German Film Critics Award. In 2011, the Hannah Höch Prize of the City of Berlin was bestowed upon her for an outstanding artistic life’s work. This encompasses not only film, but also theatre directing, painting and photography. Her artistic work has been shown at the Biennale di Venezia, the documenta and the Berlin Biennale.
Ulrike Ottinger initially worked as a freelance artist in Paris before she directed with Tabea Blumenschein in 1972-73 her first film Laokoon & Söhne (Laocoon & Sons). She then moved to Berlin, where she still lives today. Beginning in 1979, she realised her “Berlin Trilogy”: Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Portrait of a Female Drunkard. Ticket of No Return), Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press). A series of long documentaries followed, such as China. Die Künste – Der Alltag and Taiga, works which were created when travelling through Asian countries. In Countdown she applied a comparable ethnographic perspective to a Berlin between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification. In her longest documentary so far, Chamissos Schatten (Chamisso’s Shadow) from 2016, Ulrike Ottinger embarks upon a voyage for several months, tracing the course of Adelbert von Chamisso through the Bering Sea.
Chamissos Schatten is just one of a dozen of Ottinger’s films which were invited to the Berlinale during her career. The majority ran in the Forum, Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia (Joan of Arc of Mongolia) competed in the Competition in 1989. Her first Berlinale contribution, Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse from 1984, ran again last year in the context of the Retrospective “Self-determined - Perspectives of women filmmakers”.
The Berlinale Camera consists of 128 individual parts and depicts a real film camera. It is manufactured by the Düsseldorf goldsmith and artist Georg Hornemann.
Press Office
January 28, 2020