Paris Cal­ligrammes

“How can some­one con­vert their expe­ri­ences into art?” asks vet­er­an Ger­man film­mak­er Ulrike Ottinger at the begin­ning of her lat­est doc­u­men­tary, Paris Cal­ligrammes. Tak­ing the cal­ligram – a piece of text arranged to look like a relat­ed image – as inspi­ra­tion, Ottinger builds an ode to Paris from her mem­o­ries of the city’s 1960s vivac­i­ty and its influ­ence on her work.

Archival footage of Ottinger’s favourite haunts sits along­side present-day images of Paris’ artis­tic quar­ters, mark­ing the move­ment and change of the city over the last sev­er­al decades with the eye of a flâneuse. Each loca­tion is grant­ed its own chap­ter in the film, sig­ni­fied by hand­writ­ten title texts in strik­ing yel­low and Yves Klein blue, as the film­mak­er-turned-tour guide wel­comes the view­er into the anti­quar­i­an book­store and polit­i­cal hang­out Librairie Cal­ligrammes, then artist John­ny Friedlaender’s stu­dio, before stop­ping for lunch at Les Deux Magots. This is a cre­ative and flour­ish­ing Paris, but also Paris dur­ing the strife of the Alger­ian War, Paris on the brink of civ­il unrest in 1968.

As much as the film is Ottinger’s attempt to reflect on a for­ma­tive place and time in her career, it is also a bold act of posi­tion­ing one­self in a spe­cif­ic his­to­ry, along­side male peers and con­tem­po­raries, with­out wait­ing for some­one else to. Ottinger’s per­son­al his­to­ry is resigned to back­ground: at the fore is every­thing else that was going on in the city around her, every­thing that came to shape her work through a kind
of cre­ative and polit­i­cal osmo­sis. This is effec­tive on one hand as it allows Ottinger to blend into the scene, cre­at­ing no real sep­a­ra­tion between her and the Paris she was occu­py­ing. But on the oth­er, it forces the film into an objec­tiv­i­ty that denies us fur­ther insight into Ottinger’s artis­tic process and her own reflec­tions on her experience.

Still, the charm and ease with which Ottinger regales the view­er with tales of the city in the 1960s is unde­ni­ably attrac­tive, although the film does well to avoid a ​‘La Vie en Rose’-tinted view of Paris and its aura. In fact, Édith Piaf’s oth­er hit, ​‘Non, je né regrette rien,’ serves an impor­tant func­tion at the end of the film when Ottinger reminds us that Piaf ded­i­cat­ed the song to the French For­eign Legion dur­ing the Alger­ian War. The film­mak­er also ded­i­cates a chap­ter of the film to the Palais de la Porte Dorée, the home of the Paris Colo­nial Expo­si­tion in 1931 and now the Nation­al Muse­um of the His­to­ry of Immigration.

Not will­ing to over­look the country’s colo­nial past and its role in many of the lat­er events dis­cussed in the film, Ottinger fea­tures the space and its relics with a mat­ter-of-fact, obser­va­tion­al eye, yet this is the only chap­ter where it begins to feel as though Ottinger is uncer­tain of her voice. A lat­er scene at the city’s old­est auc­tion house where a col­lec­tion of items from the last impe­r­i­al fam­i­ly of Viet­nam is being sold read­dress­es this slight­ly. ​“Now the off­spring of this his­to­ry,” she says, ​“the French, Viet­namese and Africans are sit­ting here sell­ing mem­o­ries or buy­ing them back.”