An experimental documentary that unpacks a personal archive without exposition, narration, or dialogue, Ulrike Ottinger’s Still Moving (2009) relies instead on juxtapositions of sound, music, and image to create meaning and connect private histories with broad cultural practices of collecting and classification. Ottinger, always off-screen, exhibits artefacts from her artistic career and personal life, backed by an eclectic mix of popular and ethnic music. In the film, 29 minutes long and moving at a casual pace, Ottinger arranges footage of a Westernised Noh drama and her friend Lil Picard’s 74th birthday party alongside photographs, postcards, and other ephemera in a continuous, meandering sequence, as if she were paging through a photo album. Where traditional archives and collections seek to create a coherent or totalising narrative, linking objects chronologically, historically, or taxonomically, Ottinger instead uses her associative structure to propose that we create meaning through connections and the process of telling and remembering. As she says in her notes on the film on her website,
In a place far away and close by things live on by virtue of memory and the meanings bestowed upon them by human beings. My archive of objects is equal to the no less real archive of my memory. They animate each other and bring forth ever new and unexpected images and ideas. It is as if one were watching, as it takes shape, the play of thinking with its infinite interconnections.1
Ottinger rejects the archive’s attempt to exert order in favour of its potential to fascinate, employing the tools of humour, play, and pop music to undermine the more serious historicising that is usually applied to the kinds of artefacts we see in her film. These are, after all, objects owned by real people, in private spaces, rather than in museums and public archives. The objects are alive, animated by change and memory. They are still moving, as the title claims.
A playfulness in the structure of the film is evident from the beginning, as ‘Bo Mambo’, a brassy exotica number by Peruvian-American singer Yma Sumac, sets the tone. Throughout the title sequence and into the start of the film, still images and live footage are connected through visual rhymes that exploit formal elements and associations. In these early minutes, Ottinger makes compelling use of staged and highly stylised photographs of her friends, including Eddie Constantine and Veruschka, taken in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The lid of a Cuban cigar box fills the frame and is moved aside by a hand off-screen. Underneath is a photograph of Ottinger herself posing in front of a life-sized print of the Marx brothers smoking hookahs, and the angle and framing make it appear as though Ottinger is standing with them, part of the original photograph. A postcard of a cruise ship moves aside to reveal a close-up of Tabea Blumenschein, a frequent collaborator and Ottinger’s lover at the time, face to face with a fish in an aquarium. Beneath a yellowed photograph of a World War II-era airplane is a photograph of Blumenschein wearing an aviator’s cap and a look of daring. In establishing these connections, Ottinger creates a game, training the viewer to recognise formal associations – cruise ships and fish, cigars and hookahs – between diverse bits of footage. Throughout the film, formal links, not content, provide structure. In this way, the process in which the viewer engages is itself the film’s structuring device, with the viewer filling in meaning.
Still Moving is a sweet film on the surface, bridging the career and memories of a much-loved artist, but it’s also primed for provocation. At the centre of the film, Ottinger places a collection of Africana and a trove of personal photographs in which a cast of mostly white collaborators engages in ethnic costume play. These images will be familiar to anyone with an interest in Ottinger’s better-known narrative films; their content – kohl-eyed, kimono-draped characters enacting globe-trotting feminist fantasy scenes – has been criticised as imperialist, orientalist, and exoticist representations of racial and sexual stereotypes and then alternately praised for their critique of same. Rosalind Galt summarises these positions in her chapter on Ottinger in Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. She points to scholars Katie Trumpener, who notes Ottinger’s omissions of the histories of persecution and exclusion in the places where she shoots, and Kristen Whissel, who says that Ottinger commits an error of privilege, legitimising the dominance of Western culture in her failure to portray racial and ethnic difference in a new way, relying instead on cinematic tropes.2 Galt situates Ottinger’s lavish and ornamented style within queer subjectivities and ways of seeing and counters the claim that Ottinger’s own oppression and self-reflexivity as a queer filmmaker “is not enough to dislodge the fundamental racism of the ethnographic gaze.”3 Galt concedes that in the early 20th century the aesthetics of racialised spectacle, as exhibited in circuses and ethnographic expositions, was intended to reify the difference of the other. Because of this troubled history, any work that accentuates racial difference risks interpretation as spectacle, potentially discouraging a celebration of the many ways in which cultures regard beauty and aesthetic decoration as having social value. Galt argues that, in deploying prettiness and visual pleasure rather than the dreary “authenticating” gaze of ethnographic film, Ottinger makes her images of other cultures more true to reality. For Ottinger, a white, German-Jewish lesbian filmmaker, beauty and excess, abnormality and difference are strategies that increase the visibility of the ostracised. Those at the margins come to the centre in her films, often through a subversive take on beauty itself (and often resulting in non-heteronormative forms of attraction). In Still Moving, the question of whether Ottinger’s treatment of cultures and objects is neocolonial exploitation, a form of erotic tourism, or benign documentation doesn’t seem to concern the filmmaker personally – her interests lie elsewhere.
To understand the project at the heart of Still Moving, it is important to note that Ottinger uses photographs of her actors rather than film stills or clips. Photographs render time differently than moving images do, but here we see photographic time inserted into cinematographic time. We are made conscious of the time-based quality of film by the way Ottinger moves the images in front of the camera, freeing them from a dead or frozen stillness. In the same moment, her costumed play-acting is stilled into photographic form, holding markers of a specific time and place that contrast with the specific time and place inhabited by the viewer, through the formal operations of the photograph. Each of Ottinger’s costumed tableaux attempts to distill an entire narrative into a single image via clever choices of mise-en-scène, a further compression of time. Stripped of internal activity and movement, a photograph invites an attentive form of looking. A viewer is able to linger with the image, whose fixed quality belongs to the past. Unlike a time-based narrative, the stories suggested in Ottinger’s photographs leave open the space for what comes before and after, for fantasy. They harness the fun of dressing up, of inventing stories and trying on different identities. These images are not just artistic explorations but also documents of Ottinger’s life and friendships, and they summon our own associations with personal souvenirs and photographs, evoking a sense of nostalgia. Thus, the photographs bring the 1970s – as a set of recognisable, era-dependent aesthetic and cultural values, such as film stocks, camera angles, and fashion choices – into whatever present the viewer inhabits, colliding with its own set of contemporary cultural values.
It is this collision that interests Ottinger. Though little discussed in academic analyses of Ottinger’s work, Still Moving may be the most compelling and succinct embodiment of a worldview that impels her wide-ranging body of work. For Ottinger, meaning is not inherent – we create it. These meanings change with time. Rather than condemning Ottinger’s ethnic drag, should we see it as symptomatic of its era – in other words, as documentation of what artists in Germany in the 1970s did, in the cultural climate of their time? Ottinger’s images display a degree of self-awareness and humour, but she unapologetically insists that no one owns culture. This is obviously controversial. Speaking about her film Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989) in an interview with Laurence A. Rickels, Ottinger says:
I was concerned with the transfer of culture and the interesting pathways cultural ideas travel. There are only these mixtures and no separate and pure cultures. I’ve always been intrigued by this nomadization of cultural ideas—the obscure ways they take and flourish at one particular intersection and not at another. In my films I’ve often tried to re-create such a transfer.”4
In such a transfer, the viewer’s reaction completes the operation.5 Indeed, with its absence of story or narration, the assemblage of images in Still Moving holds a mirror up to viewers with the kind of revealing and inverted structure of a session with a psychoanalyst – what I think doesn’t matter; what matters is what you think about this. (In this inversion, a response of discomfort says as much about the viewer’s subject position as it does about the work.) As the question of what is appropriate in art becomes more loaded, Ottinger’s approach is more pointed and confrontational than ever.
Many of the objects in Still Moving are taken from the collection of Africana belonging to Ottinger’s father, a painter. The objects include statues, masks, weapons, ceremonial costumes, seashells, staffs, pipes, scarves, dolls, tapestries, and scraps of fabric. At the beginning of the 20th century it was fashionable for artists to acquire collections of Africana. Denise Murrell notes that at that time objects imported to Europe from Africa “were treated as artifacts of colonised cultures rather than as artworks, and held so little economic value that they were displayed in pawnshop windows and flea markets.”6 The film does not explain how or when the collection was acquired, or whether Ottinger had access to it as a child. (If she had, it might explain the way she ‘animates’ the carved figures, as one might do with dolls). But the meaning of Africana art in a Western context has always been fraught. When Modernist painters and sculptors such as Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, and Modigliani drew from the abstraction of the human form in traditional African sculpture, this was described as Primitivism, a term that reflected the Western view of non-Western aesthetics being inferior. Viewers of Still Moving might take offence at Ottinger’s casual mobilisation of Black African and Haitian Creole masks and garments, such as when a white dancer performs as a masked Damballa, a Haitian Vodou spirit, notably in a pastiche of ‘tribal’ dance movement. (Ottinger has the dancers wear gloves and neckwear, perhaps to conceal their whiteness.) In these instances the nonchalance of Ottinger’s project might be interpreted as cultural irresponsibility. Does the reading of the film shift if we keep in mind that this is Ottinger’s father’s collection of Africana and that these are objects of personal relevance to Ottinger? That its acquisition was part of a broader, culturally sanctioned practice during a particular place and time? These objects might be critical elements in her nostalgic personal narrativising, but this doesn’t mean that the problems surrounding their use disappear.
Further tensions in Still Moving arise because the ordering we expect of the archive fails amidst a lack of context. There’s no overarching story or chronology, and we’re given no information about the objects and performances. If, as Matthias Winzen in ‘Collecting—So Normal, So Paradoxical’ suggests, “[c]ollecting introduces meaning, order, boundaries, coherence, and reason into what is disparate and confused,”7 then what should we make of Ulrike Ottinger and her incoherent Cabinet of Wonder? Her edits suggest that for all of the organising strategies of the archive – systematic, taxonomic, diachronic – collections and their objects are, much like human subjectivity, prone to ambiguity and shifting meanings. In ‘Reading an Archive’, Allan Sekula writes, “Anyone who has sorted or simply sifted through a box of family snapshots understands the dilemmas (and perhaps the folly) inherent in these procedures. One is torn between narration and categorisation, between chronology and inventory.”8 Ottinger harnesses the contradictory demands of the archive, insisting that a viewer need not be torn between these drives. It can be argued by way of Sekula that Ottinger “privileges the subjectivity of the collector, connoisseur, and viewer over that of any specific author.”9 A messy archive – one in which the inherent disorder of the form is foregrounded – opens up a different way of viewing. This is an experience Ottinger frequently tries to evoke. She has spoken about her attraction to culturally specific forms of seeing, such as that engendered by Chinese scroll paintings, with their actions of “rolling out, focusing in on details, wandering to and fro, viewing piecemeal.”10 In Still Moving, the wandering gaze of the viewer completes the circuits left open by the filmmaker. Despite its charged content, the film can feel frustratingly apolitical. With no story or grounding context, no historicising voiceover or helpful narrative guide, we must confront our own associations with ethnographic and exoticised imagery and our opinions of Ottinger herself, who directs these complex operations with the insouciance of a magician or a naïf. That it is difficult to discern her subjectivity – or her awareness of it – makes for disorganised and potentially outraged viewing.
The footage, which incorporates many different threads of cultures and identities, expresses a theme that recurs throughout Ottinger’s body of work. Aimed at disrupting heteronormative spectatorship, Ottinger’s films privilege transgressive subcultures, female-driven narratives, and the slipperiness of knowledge and identity itself. At the core of this destabilised meaning-making is a recognition that history has cyclical patterns, prone to absurdity in their repetitiousness. Talking about another of her films, Ottinger says, “I tried to bring current fears together with the medieval ones in order to show the rhymes between the different anxieties that have plagued mankind under such diverse conditions over and over again.”11 In her later films, one can see the kind of detached observational stance that is central to her agenda as a filmmaker. While the image is often luxurious, campy, and stuffed to the edges of the frame with fantasy, quotation, and sexuality, Ottinger refuses to comment on her images within the form itself. She positions herself at a remove, stepping away from the process. We can see this in Still Moving, where blurred borders take shape in the objects themselves. In the opening sequence, six African statues line up in front of a carved-wood filmographer in a pith helmet, holding a camera to his eye. This stand-in for Ottinger winkingly establishes her self-reflexivity and sense of postcolonial irony. The camera is pointed at us.
Eras and influences mix further. Although carved in a traditional style, these statues wear 20th century Western street clothes, such as jeans and neckties, along with the customary stacked neck rings used by the Ndebele, Hamar, and other African tribes. In her photographs, Ottinger’s friends wear costumes that reference the exoticism of the silent-film era, the glamour of Hollywood at its peak, and the flood of images of other parts of the world coming to the West through magazines and television. Women dress as swashbuckling heroes, jazz-era gangsters, femmes fatales, and Valentino-style lovers, while men are cast as sleepy-eyed seductresses and veiled, red-lipped concubines. Babushkas, fedoras, scarves, cheongsams, turbans, and tunics – all of these activate a sense of place and time because they are unique cultural identifiers that exploit the collective memory of the visual tropes and stereotypes perpetuated by media in the West. Yet not all of Ottinger’s connections are playful or (at least) straightforwardly appropriative. In the middle of the film, a dancer appears and brandishes his wooden bazooka in an arc across the screen. He wears the bandana of a militant over his mouth. Bazooka pointed toward the camera, he opens fire. The affect is aggressive and alarming. But here Ottinger revisits her earlier strategy of association; after the gunfire, a scrap of zebra skin covers the frame. It moves to reveal Blumenschein, in another posed photograph, approaching a taxidermied animal, and the photograph itself rests on a bed of black fur. Was this “militant” actually a hunter, gunning down not human, but animal, prey? Ottinger has played with our assumptions, and her juxtapositions are ambiguous and jarring. They draw attention to the complexities involved in a contemporary sense of cultural narrative and how lost, even thwarted, we can become in the process of making meaning.
What is a collection, and what does it do? In Western culture, a collection can satisfy our need for narrative, order, and other signs of cohesion. The state or institutional control of information collectivises memory by creating a master narrative, discarding that which is discontinuous, while an unrestrained flow of images jeopardises the ability to prioritise and make sense of the world. Thus, the museum and the private collector face a common problem: the potential rigidity of narrative, whether national, cultural, social, or individual. It is this fixed and autocratic function of the archive that Ottinger opposes with the open-ended structure of Still Moving. The archive cannot bear ambiguities like the ones Ottinger plunges the viewer into and still offer the comfort of stories and boundaries. What can such an archive offer, then? Writing on the archive in ‘Objects and Selves—An Afterword’, James Clifford observes that “[w]hile these [cultural] systems are institutionalised and powerful, they are not immutable.”12 He offers a mode in which objects can be encountered with a sense of fascination: to refuse to classify non-Western objects, for instance, as either art or ethnography, restores them as objets sauvages with a power to captivate, their exotic nonspecificity allowing rhizomatic, personal connections for the viewer. (Note that this stance itself has been criticised as neocolonialist.) But he also warns against “the tendency of collections to be self-sufficient, to suppress their own historical process of production,”13 encouraging instead a self-reflexivity and self-awareness that reveals, as part of the exhibition, the choices that define the collection and the collection’s value as “a moment in the history of collecting.”14 This means that the collector, the museum, or the filmmaker must lay bare the structure and process of collecting and exhibiting, so that the cultivated “nonspecificity” of the collected objects does not erase their history and value for a specific group of people.
How to remember and what to remember are central concerns of the archive as a form. Still Moving rejects the idea that objects are inert material through which we can easily reconstitute the past. Michel Foucault suggests that history, as a discipline, is a means of controlling the past by retrospectively attaching to it the meanings of the present, and that objects, as a type of documentation themselves, can reveal discontinuities that threaten that practice.15 He points to “recurrent distributions,” frameworks that
reveal several pasts, several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies, for one and the same [discipline], as its present undergoes change: thus historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves.16
This is precisely the point at which Ottinger inserts her counter-archive. Her work suggests that the inability of the archive to do what it promises – to organise contemporary life – should not be considered a failure. A ruptured or incomplete archive unseats the sense of the self but not the experience of our own subjectivity. Ottinger’s eclectic archive forces viewers to create their own kind of cohesion. As such, Still Moving pushes against the archive’s claim to provide authoritative knowledge while still insisting on its ability to produce meaning. Consequently, the film is no mere reconstitution of a singular, personal past. Ottinger reaches into the past and also into the future to make a film about the process of how memory and association are formed, challenged and re-formed. Where museums, archives, and other institutions try to induce order in the age of mechanised reproduction, an era in which torrents of commodities and information threaten to overpower any rational system of organisation, Ottinger embraces disorder and imbues it with value. By turning from the objects that are being collected to the people who are doing the collecting, Still Moving enacts what can be seen as irresponsible erasures of culture – and provoking the question of who gets to do, say, or wear what – to make a point about archival systems of knowledge and, by extension, their relationship to how documentaries are often constructed. While this cannot remove the valid critique that Ottinger may be out of touch with the need for cultural sensitivity in a world plagued with inequities, the value of her film is that it offers a potentially triggering rupture – an opening for discourse and dissent.
1. Ulrike Ottinger’s website. 2. Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image, Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 288-9. 3. Rosalind Galt, p. 295. 4. Laurence A. Rickels, Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 144. 5. For a theorisation of the way Ottinger’s films privilege the role of the spectator as both a creator and destabiliser of meaning, see Nora M. Alter’s ‘Triangulating Performances: Looking After Genre, After Feature’ in Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema, eds. Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey and Ingeborg von Zadow. State University of New York Press, 1998. 6. Denise Murrell, ‘African Influences in Modern Art’, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. 7. Matthias Winzen, ‘Collecting—So Normal, So Paradoxical’, in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, eds. Ingrid Schaffner, Matthias Winzen, Geoffrey Batchen, Hubertus Gaßner, Siemens Kulturprogramm, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and Henry Art Gallery, Prestel, 1998), p. 23. 8. Allan Sekula, ‘Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capital’, in The Photography Reader. Edited by Liz Wells. London: Routledge, 2003. 9. Allan Sekula, p449. 10. Annette Kuhn, ‘Encounter Between Two Cultures: A Discussion with Ulrike Ottinger’, Screen, 28, no. 24, 1987, p75. 11. Laurence A. Rickels, p145. 12. James Clifford. “Objects and Selves—An Afterword,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. History of Anthropology. Vol. 3, ed. George Stocking, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p. 244. 13. James Clifford., p. 245. 14. Ibid. 15. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, 1972, pp. 7–11. 16. Michel Foucault, p. 11.
J. Makary is a filmmaker and writer whose research interests include the sublime and the connection between American wilderness and masculine identity formation. She lives in Los Angeles, where she runs Mother Ditch, a platform for experimental film artists. She is associate editor of Another Gaze.
