„In 1962, as a young artist, I came to live and work in Paris. That peri­od until 1969, when I left the city, was not only one of the most for­ma­ti­ve for me, it was also an era of intellec­tu­al, poli­ti­cal, and social uphe­aval in modern histo­ry. The film PARIS CALLIGRAMMES com­bi­nes my per­so­nal memo­ries of the 1960s with a por­trait of the city and a social car­to­gra­phy of the age. Like Guillaume Appolinaire’s poet­ry coll­ec­tion Calli- gram­mes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guer­re (Cal- ligrams: Poems of Peace and War), I have given it the form of a fil­mic “pic­tu­re-poem” (cal­li­gram) in which the words and images, com­ple­men­ted by lan­guage, sound, and music, form a mosaic that emer­ges from the viva­ci­ty of tho­se exci­ting years while spea­king to the fra­gi­li­ty of all cul­tu­ral and poli­ti­cal achie­ve­ments. The Ariadne thread through the film is a walk across Paris with many stops whe­re topics are rai­sed out of any chro­no­lo­gi­cal order. In the tra­di­ti­on of the flâ­neur, I visit focal points in the city that were meaningful to me per­so­nal­ly and to the sto­ry of the 1960s, sites whe­re signi­fi­cant poli­ti­cal events tran­spi­red, important cul­tu­ral and artis­tic encoun­ters occur­red, and new com­mu­nal ways of life evol­ved. Not only was Paris in that time a “mel­ting pot” of intellec­tu­als and artists from all over the world, it was also under­go­ing the dif­fi­cult poli­ti­cal era of deco­lo­niza­ti­on. The War in Algeria, and later the Vietnam War, over-shadowed the peri­od of rea­wa­ke­ning after the Second World War and brought peo­p­le from the colo­nies and poli­ti­cal con­flicts into the capi­tal. Thus my fri­end­ships that deve­lo­ped in tho­se years were so inter­na­tio- nal and colorful, so exci­ting and inten­se.” (Ulrike Ottinger)