 |
Ulrike Ottinger's travelogue is a lecture with a difference
By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic
Published December 4, 2003
A little more than a century ago, a native of Chicago, Elias Burton Holmes, invented what we know as the travelogue. So it's appropriate that the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago should present a contemporary extension of the genre, Ulrike Ottinger's "Southeast Passage: A Journey to New Blank Spots on the European Map."
The now-familiar form of the travelogue is based on Holmes' model: a lecture supported by photographs and film clips.
He delivered such lectures for half a century around the world, and in the mid-1960s, nearly a decade after his death, others still performed in his name at Chicago's Orchestra Hall.
Ottinger is a German filmmaker known since the 1970s for epic-length fictional features. But since 1985 she also has made several long non-fictional films. "Southeast Passage" is the fifth of them and the first she has done on video.
It records a journey from Poland to Turkey. The trip is made in three "chapters" of, respectively, 130, 140 and 90 minutes. The first traverses villages, towns and cities in four countries. The remaining two treat single cities.
Each chapter is projected from DVDs in a separate booth at the society. I saw enough excerpts to grasp something of Ottinger's approach and the overall structure. This is a travelogue with a difference.
The camera's passage, for there is no on-screen traveler, is told largely through pictures, old and new, still and moving. Some are conventionally picturesque, of buildings and sites that figure in guidebooks. But, most often, such places are glimpsed offhandedly, sometimes as if by accident, as the camera meanders on the way to somewhere else.
Hagia Sophia, one of the seven wonders of the medieval world, is viewed in relation to artistic images of its past that make it now seem just another tourist museum. And Topkapi Palace, for centuries the home of Ottoman rulers, is likewise diminished when Ottinger juxtaposes its empty rooms with Orientalist fantasies representing the harem.
Some scenes are accompanied by narration that consists of readings. The texts are not, however, descriptive of what we see. Instead, they're poems and excerpts from old journals, giving a sense of what was and has passed away or what never was and survives through romance.
Elsewhere, as in the streets of Istanbul and markets of Odessa, Ottinger seems intent on capturing only the timeless and true, that is, sights that have been the same for centuries and likely will remain so for centuries to come. These images are the least picturesque but carry the most pictorial weight.
All this unrolls slowly. Nothing momentous occurs. Life simply happens in "spots" that are "blank" because the Western eye is not accustomed to focusing on them.
This is a kind of filmmaking that's difficult to see. It's seldom in theaters, never on TV and only rarely in galleries. There is a massive gravity to it. The ancient lives in the contemporary everyday.
----------
"Ulrike Ottinger, Southeast Passage: A Journey to New Blank Spots on the European Map" continues at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., through Dec. 21. 773-702-8670.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
|
