CHAMISSO'S SHADOW

Director - Ulrike Ottinger

Script - Ulrike Ottinger

Camera - Ulrike Ottinger

With - Burghart Klaußner (Georg Wilhelm Steller), Hanns Zischler (Adelbert von Chamisso), Thomas Thieme (James Cook), Ulrike Ottinger

Production - Ulrike Oettinger Filmproduktion

It starts with Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story, which tells of a man travelling the world in seven-league boots. Adelbert von Chamisso wrote the tale before setting off to Russia on scientific expedition in 1815. He analysed the flora of Alaska and then explored the Northwest Passage, just like Cook and voyager Bering had done previously. Thus begins Ottinger’s journey from Alaska to Kamchatka via Chukotka, with her predecessors’ log books to accompany her on her way. While she describes Steller’s texts as “dramatic”, she considered Chamisso’s diaries lively and sympathetic. Ottinger also keeps a log book that bears the mark of her ethnographic and artistic interests which are also seen in images: water, fish, sea otters, stones, volcanoes, the tundra, houses, villages, photographs, objects, maps. The people she meets talk about their lives, about the past and present. She shows them working, singing and fishing, again and again. Time here doesn’t mean the film’s length but rather the centuries existing alongside one another, the time you gain in the cinema.
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus

Program

19.03.2019
GOETHE-INSTITUT - 18.30 часа
18.03.2019
GOETHE-INSTITUT - 18.30 часа

Ulrike Ottinger

Ulrike Ottinger grew up in Konstanz, where she opened her own studio at an early age. From 1962 until 1968, she lived and worked as an artist in Paris, where she exhibited at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and elsewhere. She studied etching techniques at the studio of Johnny Friedlaender and attended lectures at the Sorbonne on art history, religious studies, and ethnology with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu. In 1966, she wrote her first screenplay.
She realized her first film in 1972-1973, Laocoon & Sons. She moved to Berlin in 1973, where she filmed the happening documentation Berlinfever – Wolf Vostell. After The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors (1975), came the female pirate film Madame X (1977).
Her “Berlin trilogy” began with Ticket of No Return (1979), followed by Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984).
China. The Arts – The People (1985) is the first in a series of long documentary films made in the course of Ulrike Ottinger’s travels through Asia. She made the narrative film Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia in 1989, followed three years later by the eight-hour documentary film Taiga.
For Chamisso's Shadow (2016), Ulrike Ottinger traveled for months on the trail of Adelbert von Chamisso through the far-flung regions of the Bering Sea. Her longest documentary (12 h) so far, interweaves beautiful landscapes with ethnological insights and personal experiences. Like many of her previous films, Chamisso's Shadow had it’s premiere at the Berlinale.

FILMOGRAPHY

1973 Laokoon & Sons (Laokoon & Söhne)
1973 Berlinfieber – Wolf Vostell – short doc.
1975 The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors (Die Betörung der blauen Matrosen)
1978 Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (Madame X – Eine absolute Herrscherin)
1979 Ticket of No Return (Bildnis einer Trinkerin)
1981 Freak Orlando
1984 The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press (Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse)
1987 Usinimage – short
1986 China. Die Künste - der Alltag. Eine filmische Reisebeschreibung) – doc.
1989 Joan of Arc of Mongolia (Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia)
1990 Countdown – doc.
1992 Taiga
1997 Exile Shanghai (Exil Shanghai) – doc.
2002 Südostpassage – doc.
2004 Zwölf Stühle
2007 Prater – doc.
2008 The Korean Wedding Chest (Die koreanische Hochzeitstruhe) – doc.
2011 Under Snow (Unter Schnee) – doc.
2016 Chamissos's Shadow (Chamissos Schatten) – док.

CHAMISSO'S SHADOW / CHAMISSOS SCHATTEN

Germany, 2016, 720′, color, documentary

Program

Ulrike Ottinger