An apprentice turns artist
‘Paris Calligrammes’ (2020) Review
Ulrike Ottinger drives her petite sky-blue Isetta with owls she has painted on it herself towards Paris in 1962. The car breaks down due to engine damage. She hitchhikes only to find a cool black Citroën stopping. This big car has five men in it. Ottinger assumes they are bank robbers but feels safe around them. They bring her to Paris.
She is 20, and has gone there to become an important artist. “Everything fascinated me,” she says, “walking and seeing became my most exhilarating pastime.” Calligrammes, on the other hand, is the title of a “collection of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, published in French in 1918,” according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. The subtitle of this collection is “Poems of Peace and War.”
She walks around with and sees everything through a camera. This helps this documentary find its footing and footage very much. It is her personal account, nonetheless, that breathes life into the film.
Yes, Paris is the protagonist. There are so many details, people, and places, though, that you will lose count of them. Each of them has a backstory that is equally interesting. And tangentially fascinating to why the 20-year-old set out to Paris in the first place.
To exemplify, she reads out from her French book in English. It turns out that almost all of it but the last line is a quote from a polymath, who died in a forest at the age of 41, with an open copy of ‘Hamlet’ by his body:
“Advice to the good traveller:
A town at the end of the road.
And road extending a town.
Do not choose one or the other.
But one and the other by turns.
I gladly followed that advice of Victor Segalen”
If I were to detail the backgrounds and trivia about each of the individuals that Ottinger goes through in the course of her 129-minute documentary, I would be writing about 20th century France and not about Ottinger's 2020 film. I will stick to the prominent ones because the documentary is about the artists she meets. She herself has made the job easier by dividing the film to ten chapters.
Fritz Picard of the Librairie Calligrammes is first. The name ‘Baxter’ has replaced ‘Calligrammes’ today, and the storefront has Ottinger’s books. Back then, too, it was a place for “anyone with an interest in German literature.” “An antiquarian bookstore” which was a hangout for the Jews. Most books were authored by banned writers, or rescued from being burnt in Nazi Germany.
Picard, in a 1963 interview, says that his bookstore houses everything “from Goethe all the way ‘downhill’ to 1933.” He had to flee, however, leaving behind his beautiful private collection. Famous names from 1952 onwards drown Picard’s guest book, which Ottinger finds in time for her film. Of actors, artists, scholars, sculptors, writers, Dadaists, Marxists, and “Heideggerians” (Picard was a classmate of Heidegger, apparently).
On the one hand, you have Ottinger dropping names and, on the other, you have them complemented with the visuals from the guest book – people have drawn and doodled (a lot!), left messages, just signed, praised the man, and seemingly pasted an entire postcard. There is footage of Picard’s interview and Ottinger telling us how he could identify them by typeface. He shows us by recognising an 1843 German Shakespeare book.
It is almost as if he is hunting fossils at a rapid pace in any second-hand book storage facility, classifying them, labelling them, and saving them for the future. He also ruminates about passing them on and how all antiquarians have to pass on their collection.
Johnny Friedlaender is second and Ottinger takes us to his studio. A member of the École de Paris, she learns etching techniques from him. Working with him establishes Ottinger as an artist and lands her a radio interview for her ‘Israel’ portfolio. There are eight more chapters to the documentary, but not all of them are as long as Picard’s. Friedlaender’s bit was lesser than ten minutes.
The third chapter is Saint Germain des Prés, famously known to have the literary and philosophical giants Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir write their books in there, as Ottinger mentions. The café finds multiple mentions in Sarah Bakewell’s acclaimed non-fiction, ‘At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails,’ which is a gem of a book. “You could receive phone calls there, and they would reliably pass on messages,” Ottinger says, and acknowledges the apricot cocktail.
By the time we come to the fifth chapter titled ‘Pop! My Parisian Experiments with Forms,’ colour takes over the documentary briefly and it is, rightfully, introduced by the 1964 ‘Dieu, est-il Pop?’ The gaze then turns towards three-dimensional art, exhibitions, moving images; all of which can be glimpsed on Ottinger’s website. The film itself seems adapted from a book she wrote, the one she was reading out from, and she has written quite a few.
‘Paris Calligrammes’ is an example of how an artist took the trouble to be at the heart of where everything is. She worked hard under the mentorship of true artists. And became one herself – one with too many feathers in her cap. Ulrike Ottinger wrote, filmed, and directed this documentary. She not only brings in the personal, but the political, too, which I have not gone into. Anette Fleming edited the film while Timothée Alazraki gave it its original sound.
Ottinger has let her work and inspiration speak for her. Little do we know of her personal life, or parents, or partners, or politics through this documentary. She has never been to Israel when she is called for that first radio interview, yet her paintings – at least, the ones she has shown us in this film of that collection – are stunning. She's gone back to Germany now, but how can anybody dare not call her a Parisian?
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