Almost exactly a year after the world premiere of Ulrike Ottinger’s most recent film, the 12-hour opus CHAMISSOS SCHATTEN (Germany 2016), at the Berlinale Forum, Arsenal presents the four parts of her large-scale cinematic expedition to the Arctic, along Russia’s easternmost coast and the peninsula of Kamchatka. Inspired by the accounts of former explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, Georg Wilhelm Steller, Reinhold und Georg Forster and Adelbert von Chamisso, Ottinger too kept a logbook, linking her own artistic and ethnographic viewpoint to the historical findings and visual depictions. So past and present meet and historical and cultural changes become visible. A field of tension emerges between the then and now, showing how inseparable the two are.(CHAMISSOS SCHATTEN, Chapters 1–4, 15., 22., 27.1. & 29.1., followed by a discussion with Ulrike Ottinger)
