Ulrike Ottinger’s recollections of life as a budding artist in 1960s Paris challenge the city’s image as a creative utopia
Mostly comprising of a voiceover and archival footage, German auteur Ulrike Ottinger’s new film feels like a stylistic shift from the avant-garde, carnivalesque works of queer radicalism for which she is best known. Underneath the unhurried pace and the exhaustive account of Ottinger’s experience of 1960s Paris as a budding artist, there is a politically conscious playfulness that displays her ability to interweave different art forms and storytelling styles.
True to its title, the film rolls like a calligram, a text format where words are arranged to form a thematically relevant image. Ottinger’s recollections of past encounters with intellectual and artistic luminaries coalesce into a portrait of Paris, as well as herself. Calligrammes is the name of a bookstore owned by Fritz Picard that became...
Mostly comprising of a voiceover and archival footage, German auteur Ulrike Ottinger’s new film feels like a stylistic shift from the avant-garde, carnivalesque works of queer radicalism for which she is best known. Underneath the unhurried pace and the exhaustive account of Ottinger’s experience of 1960s Paris as a budding artist, there is a politically conscious playfulness that displays her ability to interweave different art forms and storytelling styles.
True to its title, the film rolls like a calligram, a text format where words are arranged to form a thematically relevant image. Ottinger’s recollections of past encounters with intellectual and artistic luminaries coalesce into a portrait of Paris, as well as herself. Calligrammes is the name of a bookstore owned by Fritz Picard that became...
- 8/23/2021
- by Phuong Le
- The Guardian - Film News
It would be a great mistake, sight unseen, to pigeonhole Ulrike Ottinger’s “Paris Calligrammes” as just another nostalgia-filled personal documentary about how amazing life was in Paris in the 1960s. Where others self-servingly wax lyrical about being in the nexus of the Left Bank’s Golden Age of hipness and activism, Ottinger takes us through this formative time of her life in a way that deftly balances past and present to paint a picture of a threshold era of both positives and negatives.
Recounted in the director’s own measured voiceover (the English version features Jenny Agutter while the French version has Fanny Ardant) and largely composed of found footage, film clips and home movies, the film reflects the director’s generosity of spirit as well as the period’s bubbling cauldron of syncretic and opposing movements. Promoted together with a handsome book tie-in, “Paris Calligrammes” should spark renewed...
Recounted in the director’s own measured voiceover (the English version features Jenny Agutter while the French version has Fanny Ardant) and largely composed of found footage, film clips and home movies, the film reflects the director’s generosity of spirit as well as the period’s bubbling cauldron of syncretic and opposing movements. Promoted together with a handsome book tie-in, “Paris Calligrammes” should spark renewed...
- 3/6/2020
- by Jay Weissberg
- Variety Film + TV
Tom Stoppard’s Tony-winning 1974 play Travesties, stuffed thick as a English gentleman’s armchair, its ideas on art, war, patriotism and purposeful nonsense fashioned into a nonstop tourney of wit and erudition, has often been called a brainteaser, but brain tickler comes so much closer to the jubilant staging presented by Broadway’s Roundabout Theatre Company.
Directed by Patrick Marber and starring Tom Hollander, this Travesties arrives at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre following its well-received 2016 London staging, its mostly new cast missing not so much as a breath or a notion.
The play, which points to the luxurious density of Stoppard’s later masterworks Arcardia and The Coast of Utopia, launches with a hang-on-tight monologue delivered by Henry Carr (Hollander), an aging British consul whose first claim to literary immortality was a passing mention in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Here, Carr, a real-life figure,...
Directed by Patrick Marber and starring Tom Hollander, this Travesties arrives at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre following its well-received 2016 London staging, its mostly new cast missing not so much as a breath or a notion.
The play, which points to the luxurious density of Stoppard’s later masterworks Arcardia and The Coast of Utopia, launches with a hang-on-tight monologue delivered by Henry Carr (Hollander), an aging British consul whose first claim to literary immortality was a passing mention in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Here, Carr, a real-life figure,...
- 4/25/2018
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
In the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of “Travesties,” a sign (“Ruhe Bitte”) on the show’s set advises us to please be quiet in the Zurich reading room where Tom Stoppard’s 1973 comedy takes place. But you can forget about that, because the sound of laughter can’t be contained.
Written when the playwright was a mere stripling, this extravagant farce bristles with clever wordplay, from Joycean limericks (“There was a young man from Dublin ….”) to Wildean epigrams. (“I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness.”) One dazzling scene, in fact, is written entirely in limericks.
Fun on its own etymological terms, this madcap comedy also tips its hat — a beat-up straw boater with a jaunty red hatband — to the spirit of revolution that galvanized Europe in 1917. The War to End All Wars, as the First World War was ironically mis-named,...
Written when the playwright was a mere stripling, this extravagant farce bristles with clever wordplay, from Joycean limericks (“There was a young man from Dublin ….”) to Wildean epigrams. (“I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness.”) One dazzling scene, in fact, is written entirely in limericks.
Fun on its own etymological terms, this madcap comedy also tips its hat — a beat-up straw boater with a jaunty red hatband — to the spirit of revolution that galvanized Europe in 1917. The War to End All Wars, as the First World War was ironically mis-named,...
- 4/25/2018
- by Marilyn Stasio
- Variety Film + TV
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