2019: Ulrike Ottinger, “Thinking in Pictures: In Conversation with Deniz Göktürk”

March 12, 2019

Ulrike Ottinger, “Thinking in Pictures: In Conversation with Deniz Göktürk”

Berkeley Mosse Lecture
https://mosselectures.wisc.edu/berkeley/

Tuesday, 12 March 2019, 18:30 PDT

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
2155 Center Street
Berkeley, CA

Sponsored by:
Global Mosse Lecture Series
The Mosse Foundation
UC Berkeley Department of German
BAMPFA

Moderator: Deniz Göktürk

The UC Berkeley Department of German and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive are pleased to host Ulrike Ottinger’s Mosse Lecture. Ottinger will present an illustrated talk discussing her approach to the visual design of her films, as well as her research methods for a nonfiction project like Chamisso’s Shadow. Following her presentation, Ottinger will be joined for an onstage conversation with Deniz Göktürk, professor of German and film studies at UC Berkeley.

Ottinger’s talk is the third Mosse Lecture hosted by the Department of German since the prestigious lecture series began at UC Berkeley. The Mosse Lectures at UC Berkeley are public humanities events with a focus on the cultural significance of visual and other media. The Berkeley series has included conversations with eminent filmmakers and writers on questions of capitalism, populism, utopian fiction, documentary poetics, and cultural memory.

This series is organized by the UC Berkeley Department of German with support from The Mosse Foundation and the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Co-presenting partners include the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the German Historical Institute.

Ottinger lectures from the podium — German artist **Ulrike Ottinger** (born 1942) works in film, photography, and the visual arts and has been associated with movements including the New German Cinema, feminism, and ethnographic film over the course of her prestigious career. As a filmmaker, she has always directed from behind the lens of the camera, bringing her talents as a cinematographer to the fore and uniting her directorial vision with the way she witnesses the world. Her films are distinguished by their marvelous subjects and sense of wonder in all things. This series features her Berlin trilogy made between 1979 and 1984—*Ticket of No Return*, *Freak Orlando*, and *The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press*—as examples of her work in the narrative form, for which she has often created fantastical images. Also included are several nonfiction works that reveal her fascination with history: the award-winning Prater, about the amusement park in Vienna; *Exile Shanghai*, which traces the experiences of members of the Jewish diaspora who made their way to Shanghai in the 1930s; and the monumental *Chamisso’s Shadow*, a work of remarkable beauty filmed on her journey to the remote reaches of the Bering Sea, tracing the paths of past explorers. We are honored that Ulrike Ottinger will be our filmmaker in residence for a week coinciding with her Mosse Lecture on March 12, presented in partnership with the Department of German at UC Berkeley.

-Ottinger bio written by Susan Oxtoby, Senior Film Curator at BAMPFA

**Deniz Göktürk** earned her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1995, with a dissertation on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture. She also worked as a certified translator of Turkish for law courts, hospitals and publishers for several years. Her first full-time teaching appointment was at the University of Southampton, UK, in the School of Modern Languages and the Film Program from 1995 to 2001. She joined the Department of German at Berkeley in fall 2001. She has served as graduate adviser and department chair.

She has held awards and grants from the DAAD, the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, the Institute for European Studies, the Institute for International Studies, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Digital Humanities at Berkeley. She has been an invited fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz and the Center for Cinepoetics at the Freie Universität Berlin

On campus, she holds affiliations with the Department of Film and Media, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Digital Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. She has participated in cross-campus collaborations on “Cultural Forms in Transit” and a strategic working group on “Circulation.” She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the electronic journal launched by the Berkeley German Department in September 2005, and coordinator of the Multicultural Germany Project.