“How can someone convert their experiences into art?” asks veteran German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger at the beginning of her latest documentary, Paris Calligrammes. Taking the calligram – a piece of text arranged to look like a related image – as inspiration, Ottinger builds an ode to Paris from her memories of the city’s 1960s vivacity and its influence on her work.

Archival footage of Ottinger’s favourite haunts sits alongside present-day images of Paris’ artistic quarters, marking the movement and change of the city over the last several decades with the eye of a flâneuse. Each location is granted its own chapter in the film, signified by handwritten title texts in striking yellow and Yves Klein blue, as the filmmaker-turned-tour guide welcomes the viewer into the antiquarian bookstore and political hangout Librairie Calligrammes, then artist Johnny Friedlaender’s studio, before stopping for lunch at Les Deux Magots. This is a creative and flourishing Paris, but also Paris during the strife of the Algerian War, Paris on the brink of civil unrest in 1968.

As much as the film is Ottinger’s attempt to reflect on a formative place and time in her career, it is also a bold act of positioning oneself in a specific history, alongside male peers and contemporaries, without waiting for someone else to. Ottinger’s personal history is resigned to background: at the fore is everything else that was going on in the city around her, everything that came to shape her work through a kind
of creative and political osmosis. This is effective on one hand as it allows Ottinger to blend into the scene, creating no real separation between her and the Paris she was occupying. But on the other, it forces the film into an objectivity that denies us further insight into Ottinger’s artistic process and her own reflections on her experience.

Still, the charm and ease with which Ottinger regales the viewer with tales of the city in the 1960s is undeniably attractive, although the film does well to avoid a ‘La Vie en Rose’-tinted view of Paris and its aura. In fact, Édith Piaf’s other hit, ‘Non, je ne regrette rien,’ serves an important function at the end of the film when Ottinger reminds us that Piaf dedicated the song to the French Foreign Legion during the Algerian War. The filmmaker also dedicates a chapter of the film to the Palais de la Porte Dorée, the home of the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931 and now the National Museum of the History of Immigration.

Not willing to overlook the country’s colonial past and its role in many of the later events discussed in the film, Ottinger features the space and its relics with a matter-of-fact, observational eye, yet this is the only chapter where it begins to feel as though Ottinger is uncertain of her voice. A later scene at the city’s oldest auction house where a collection of items from the last imperial family of Vietnam is being sold readdresses this slightly. “Now the offspring of this history,” she says, “the French, Vietnamese and Africans are sitting here selling memories or buying them back.”