Grotesque Moments

Ulrike Ottinger in Conversation with Gerald A. Matt and Verena Konrad

Gerald A. Matt: You started as a painter and later became famous as a filmmaker. In parallel to this, you went on making photographs. How do you view the relationship between painting, photography and film in your work?

Ulrike Ottinger: Before I began to make films, I not only painted and mad graphic art but also worked in the field of performance. Even for the pictures I painted in Paris at the beginning of the 1960s, I created “living pictures” with my friends. My big triptychs with narrations in the bande dessinée manner, and other pictures, came about in that way. In exhibitions in Paris and Fontainebleau, I included books I was reading at the time in the exhibition, and a gramophone played acoustic collages and music from my old record collection. In these shows, I applied the principle of collage on the levels of image, text and sound.

But my photographic work, at first only in black and white, had a lot to do with sketching and documenting reality. I had collected large amounts of everyday material on the streets of Paris for my paintings, sometimes in drawings, sometimes in photographs. In other words, from the very beginning, my photos led a double life: as independent photographs and as parts of an integrated whole. For example, there are staged photos where I worked with Tabea Blumenschein, even ten years before Bildnis einer Trinkerin showing an elegant lady going through a variety of drinking adventures. Or, there are photographs of particular parts and buildings of Berlin, which I made already years before Freak Orlando, where they develop a parallel world against the background of the toy shop, telling the story of industrial architecture in Berlin.  At the same time, there are photographs made on the sets of my films, which come closest to the genre of the film still. And then, there is my big collection of travel photographs, which were sometimes made quite independently of films and sometimes as a way to prepare for them. In other words, photography had more than one function for me. I view the photos that were made in the context of filming as something independent, even though they are part of the overall concept. For me, photography is a medium I am very familiar with, like a painter who makes sketches: for example, while travelling as a visual note for my film script of for the conception of complex wholes or details. I try to find an appropriate form for every theme and every situation.

Verena Konrad: In the exhibition The Circus as a Parallel Universe1 , you are represented with both films and photographs. From what point of view did these works come about?

When you work as an artist, you search for images or figures that point clearly to something. For example, how could you show a complicated and indissoluble relationship better than with Siamese twins? Siamese twins have to share everything, even the most intimate things. We live in indissolubilities and it is characteristic of civilisation that we can live with these indissolubilities.

I find it enormously interesting to work with extremes. With extremes, you can show many things much better. While I was working on Freak Orlando, I talked about this topic with many people, for example with Paulchen Glauber, or Fräulein Mausi, who appeared in famous circus shows. I especially like to remember the huge photo collection of Paulchen Glauber and his description and stories. People like him had a very special relationship to their own difference: due to his small growth, he was a star in his field. The meaning of difference is itself quite different today. For example, the stories of Therese Zemp, the student of political science, who played a woman without an abdomen in Freak Orlando, show rather her vulnerability and the insults from being stigmatised. After filming the work on Freak Orlando, we often had a meal together and talked for a long time, and the perceptions of these two people in relation to their difference were very dissimilar. The older ones were famous and lived from exposing themselves. Those in the younger generation have modern jobs and suffer in everyday life from people looking away.

Another phenomenon adds to this: sideshows disappeared here during the Nazi period. The different, the deformed were not allowed to exist next to the fascist ideal of the “perfect human”. Freak Orlando also shows, therefore, how reactions to outsiders differ in different times. Every episode plays out in a different time while reflecting the present, and vice versa.

Matt: What significance to formal aspects like colour and frames have in relation to your work with the camera?

Colours are very important for my films and photographs, because they convey moods, and do so independently of or in addition to the persons, things or landscapes that are shown. This is not a matter of individual colours, but rather of the way the colours are set against each other: perhaps rigidly divided from each other as in Kabuki theatre, where they stand next to each other clear and unmixed, or changing, in cases where I dissolve the passages of light and colours almost impressionistically. (...) In my film Bildnis einer Trinkerin, I worked with a gradual transition of colours: from red to yellow to blue to silver. The film begins with the colour red filling the entire picture. Then it leaves the camera and becomes visible as the colour of the protagonist’s coat and hat, just as she begins her big adventure under the sigh of Aller – Jamais Retour. As she moves from station to station in her journey, the elegant drunkard is immersed in constantly changing surroundings, which turn out optically to be pools of colour. In this process, Tabea Blumenschein’s costumes change colour from bright red and yellow to chic blue and ultimately to a transparently shimmering silver. The silver is no longer able to lend colour to the figure, but it reflects the surroundings all the more intensely. Consequently, a mirror theme is contained in the thematic use of colour. I like the work with reflective surfaces such as glass, water, mirrors, foils and flowing materials. The make it possible to find images for whatever is double, flowing and dissolving. Frames have a similar function in my pictures. I often go to see collections and museums. When I was living in Paris, for eight years, I went to the Louvre once a week. Sometimes I went to see just one picture. I thought a great deal about picture compositions and selected the outlines around my photos very consciously. In this way, I demonstrated that it is always a matter of making pictures. The clearest example is the theatrical proscenium of my film Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse. It has illustrations painted in the style of the fin-de-siècle painter Gustave Moreau. They point towards the exotism of the colonial opera being presented inside the proscenium. It is a multi-layered construction: outside the framework is the story of Dr. Mabuse, the female boss of an international media concern, and Dorian Gray, her pupil, victim and rival. I set the deliberately artificial proscenium within a natural landscape. The curtain goes up and the natural world becomes an operatic stage. Art frames nature: the sea in the background is real, but the cloudy sky has been painted and is part of the frame. Another image shows a cliff-face with a cave, which, supported by textile drapes, becomes a box in a theatre. From there, Dr. Mabuse and Dorian Gray watch themselves as audience members at the opera – in their stage roles, they play the Grand Inquisitor of Seville and a young Spanish infanta. I enjoy working with such frames within frames and trompe-l’oeil effects. They always create possibilities for reflecting on the relationship between art and nature.

Matt: The people you like working with and often do work with are in many cases – like Tabea Blumenschein or Veruschka von Lehndorff – very beautiful. What does beauty mean to you, and what role does the grotesque, the other, the absurd and the alien play in your work, and especially in your portraits?

For me, the beautiful and the grotesque are inseparably linked. That is why I like to juxtapose or combine them in an image. For only this can make it clear, as Karl Rosenkranz wrote, that beauty arises from the ugly as the result of a process that removes all flaws from the everyday. Beauty is primarily an ideal, then an image in art, and sometimes it occurs in reality, because we look for it and find it. And the reverse also applies: the ugly becomes clear first and foremost in its contrast with ideal beauty as difference and differentiation. While the beautiful face and the beautiful form tend towards the static, the other, disturbing body is revealed in its friction with the beautiful, and this gives it an enormous variety and liveliness. I am interested in the two poles, but even more in their transitions and contaminations. In many of my pictures, Tabea Blumenschein is condensed into an image of beauty. In the photo sequence Der Schrei, this icon successively transforms itself. The face begins to move in mime until it reaches the borderline to a grimace. It is clear only in reciprocal reference that beauty is also an artificial attitude and that ugliness grows out of it dynamically. For me, deformation is a revealing commentary on the ideal form and vice versa. In my film Freak Orlando and in the related photographs, this connection is the main theme of the narration. Here dwarfish and overlarge people, two-headed people and women without and abdomen are the main actors in a cosmos inhabited on equal terms by real and imaginary bodies. Like the eponymous character, they are sent through historical metamorphoses, until they reach their destination at a festival of the ugly in northern Italy. But where the ugly outdoes itself, it brings the beautiful forth as an outsider and curiosity. And so, the French film icon, Delphine Seyrig, in a Playboy Bunny costume, accepts the trophy; in a competition of the ugly, the beautiful is the freak par excellence. While the closing episode of the film turns into a theme on the level of narrative, what has always interested me, as well, is a question of aesthetics. So I made many photographic studies with the main actor of Freak Orlando, Magdalena Montezuma, in which she becomes a monstrous figure by using leather, metal and prosthetic accessories, or her clearly made-up features in a distorting mirror undergo a metamorphosis into abstract schemata. Form and deformation are central for me, because often their combination first makes visible the artistic work on the beautiful.

The mirror, and especially the distorting mirror, has great importance for me. It can be found in most of my films from the Berlin Trilogy to Prater. Thousands of photographic studies with Tabea Blumenschein, Magdalena Montezuma and some with Veruschka have been made between the beginning of the 1970s and today. It is a discomforting or grotesque, sometimes also amusing and very expressive image of distortion, displacement, metamorphosis, cross fading or fusion. In Bildnis einer Trinkerin with Tabea Blumenschein, mirror images are dissolved into each other by means of pouring fluids over them. And in Prater, Veruschka undergoes biarre metamorphoses in a bizarre cabinet of mirrors. In this connection, I recall my shock when, on my first journey to India, at the foot of temple staircases or in courtyards, I came across beggars, lepers or people disfigured by elephantiasis, of the kind I had staged a year before in the medieval episode of Freak Orlando. It was a shock that comes when one’s own imagination meets reality. When Freak Orlando was being made, in 1980/81, beggars were not a part of everyday life on our streets, as they are today, especially where poor people from southeast Europe kneel on every street corner with their hands folded, like images of patrons in old pictures, modestly placed at the lower margin of the scene. Fiction comes shockingly close to reality, and reality is a construction, sometimes an illusion.

Konrad: In your film Prater, you describe in film a “Wish and Dream Machine”, which plays a special role in Vienna and which has a clear relationship to our theme of the circus as well as to the scenes at an annual fair. What drew your attention to the Prater? What meaning does the Prater have for you?

The very first time I saw the Prater was from the studio of the sculptor Karl Prantl. I visited him in 1969 or 1970, looked out the window and then decided already that I would take a closer look at that special place. However, in connection with the film Prater, I started with my research work much later, in 1998, when I was invited to a symposium on Elfriede Jelinek and spent some days in Vienna. At that time, I took the opportunity to visit museums and archives, and to speak with many people who worked in the Prater. In general, places play a very important role for me, especially places on the periphery. My preoccupation with Prater is also to be seen in this connection. Although the Prater is a very central place in Vienna, it is nonetheless extraterritorial; it is a place of possibility. All social classes come together here, rich and poor, rural and urban, Viennese and people from elsewhere. The really fascinating thing about this place is that history of pleasure, social classes, zeitgeist, fashion and technical development, Here the side shows are called illusion businesses, and that is also appropriate for cinema. It works with the strategy of seduction, to which you have to add your own imagination, so that the thing can take effect. Especially in this film, I again rethought the theme of illusion and imagination, imitation and simulation, or simulation techniques. Early cinema was a cinema of attractions, and its birthplace is the funfair. It has much more to do with the “Siamese twins” illusion/imagination than today’s commercial cinema. That has become a simulation cinema, analogous to the amusement arcades, whose products are also derived from space research and pilot training. The ventriloquist, who seems to make his dolls talk, is, on the other hand, and imitator of the ancient kind, like the imitators of animal voices in nomadic or hunter societies.

What is illusion? Is it a rocking horse on whose back a child leaps along at a wild gallop, is it a paradise of snow in a frozen mall in the Emirates, where a person can experience storming the peak and enjoying a downhill run with high-tech equipment and outfits? Is it a space journey, a flight in a fighter jet, a run with the speedboat or motorbike with the aid of new simulation techniques?

The Prater is a time machine. And that is why I have worked, in addition to my new film images, with all kinds of quotations. Veruschka as Barbarella or an evil Barbie doll is also a quotation. Elfriede Jelinek and Elfriede Gerstl wrote personal, poetic-analytical texts for the film. They read their own texts and thus quote themselves. From an incredible range of great literature, I have also selected texts by Elias Canetti, Felix Salten and an unpublished typescript by Erich Kästner. Among the many photographic documents, Emily Mayer is especially notable. He captured the Prater from the turn of the century to the thirties, with a preference for observing the spectators. Music from mechanical music automats, funfair organs, mechanical dolls and music boxes can be heard, with all their catchy tunes from various times. And, last but not least, the cinema appears with quotations from itself in the form of excerpts from documentaries and feature films from the turn of the century into the 1960s.

This range of references in combination with my new pictures from the Prater not only shows the history of the leisure activities over time but also makes an amalgam in which their surprisingly constant structure becomes visible.

Konrad: In many of your works, you have worked with people who have a close relationship to the circus, such as the Zirkus Renz in Bildnis einer Trinkerin. There we see Frau Renz dancing on a tightrope.

Yes, after a gap of 25 years she went back onto the rope for this film! Isn’t that wonderful? What fascinates me about the circus and circus people is their absolutely professional attitude to the artistic. I am simply a total circus fan and I am one of those people who still like going to the circus today. I think people who work in the circus live from the circus as well. That is something I find very interesting, and in that I see a connection with touring theatres, travelling cinemas, the rhapsodists who travel around with their stories and storytelling, and of course the cinema as well.

Matt: What would you say, finally, characterises you as an artist?

I think it is the ability to take the things we see and experience and to condense them so artistically that their inner substance becomes visible. Or, to play with reality by putting its elements into new worlds, so that our vision can become sharper.

• 1Editor’s note: A selection of Ulrike Ottinger's works were shown in the 2012 group exhibition ‘The Circus as a Parallel Universe’ curated by Verena Konrad and Gerald Matt at the Kunsthalle Wien. The theme of the circus in Ottinger's works was specifically included here referencing a metaphor for a utopian perspective in which the circus appears as the gentle twin of revolution.