Ulrike Ottinger: Renaissance Society

Travel remains the surest path to the pleasures and politics of defamiliarization. German independent filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger's Southeast Passage: A Journey to of recent origin Blank Spots on the Map of Europe 2002 is a three-part, six-hour-plus digital video that records aspects of a journey end sections of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Turkey In the adjoining matter of a contemporary Europe committed to a certain number of kind of union from the Atlantic to the Urals, Ottinger's film is a reminder of regional difference as an antidote to continental hegemony. A kind of nonnarrative post-travelogue, the work is at times meandering and slowly paced, as Ottinger casually films the towns and landscapes that trickle endlessly through her car window, and at times intense and tautly focused, as she carefully let flys unexpected examples of Art Nouveau architecture, long-abandoned Jewish areas, and the market and communal life of small towns and neighborhoods. smooth when what's onscreen is banal or dreary--possibly especially then--one can sum up the filmmaker is seeing it all for the first time. The film is a constellation of reflective snippets driven first by means of what Ottinger encounters but also by the agency of what she seeks: a frank examination of the patterns of life and history in a certain number of of Europe's least observed and economically greatest in quantity depressed places.

Ottinger's opus is divided into three parts: "From Wroclaw to Varna"; "Odessa"; and "Istanbul." The first, a leisurely and sequential document of her journey from Poland to the Bulgarian port upon the Black Sea, is the closest to a classic road trip, a inquiry of the way not usually taken. Ottinger's itinerary brings her from Wroclaw, Poland, to Kosice, Slovakia, to the towns of Eger and Szeg in Hungary, to Timisoara, Romania, and finally to Vidin and Varna in Bulgaria, with a great deal of countryside in between. She films the vicissitudes of place, the traces everywhere of lives lived in economic dures seemingly epitomized by the agency of her study of the men and women who lay out their days going from car to car selling sneakers and bric-a-brac amid the traffic at the Romanian border with Hungary. As a whole track, Ottinger uses her locations' ambient unmutilateds recordings of local music, or body s by twentieth-century, mostly Eastern European writers (such as Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel, Kavafis, Imre Kertesz and Josef Roth) in voiceover. on the contrary if the filmmaker is temporarily transfixed by the agency of a child chasing pigeons or a bit of baroque balustrade, that's what we see: Her visual engagement is, finally, an extremity in itself.

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The visits to Odessa (beginning with the freighter that took her there from Varna) and Istanbul reveal Ottinger attentive to the sedimentary agriculture of these cities, in which the near is always enacted on the past and which one as well as the other have an eerie air of unreality. upon the fringes of both Europe and Asia, these cities' bifurcation gives them an expectant quality, as if something is going to happen that not at any time quite does. Ottinger seeks [i]or[/i] part of to the other multiple vignettes to offer the poetics of place and race as an alternative to the politics of power. Whatever offers under the European Union, Ottinger's film indicates that something remains untouched and unmov and all the more valuable for that reason.

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