Ulrike Ettinger Elena Stanciucu : Verusch eine Portrait Germany 1997 (17 mins)
Extracts from Discussion with Katy Deepwell at Ostranenie after viewing the film
This is my first work in video where I tried to make a documentary. My other videos have been completely different in that I knew what I wanted to do before I made them. This video has the subtitle 'An Attempt of a Portrait' and during the making of the work I tried to find out what would be my vision and how I could realise it.
I was impressed by Elena Stanciucu as a subject because of her work as a weaver, and her attempt to use techniques and ideas of folk art which were starting to disappear. It seemed to me she lived a good life with this passion. She made a lot of work and she found a way to combine this with her family and her work in the village where she lived in Rumania. The work became part of her life.
Elena Stanciucu died three years before I decided to make the film but I didn't know this when I went to the village to make the film. I decided to try and show the situation as it is and the things which are still there in the way they are. I grew up in a big town in Rumania and there are a lot of things about life in the village which are closed to me and I look at them with completely different eyes. What I tried to do was to find a way to get the people watching this film to gain an approach but always with the question: is it possible to know this person and place by film and by images like this with a video camera? So I decided to show the places in the village where she would have been, some of her house, photos which offer information about her and a context for her growing up. The comments on the back of photos are the only language offered in the film. There are a lot of details about her life and what was important to her.
Part of her family in the village keeps all her things in boxes and they brought them out specially for me and for the camera. There are no museums or collections for this work. People don't trust the collections of the Rumanian state and have had bad experiences with them so they want to keep these pieces even though they have no possibility to show them. They know they are valuable. In their everyday life, they have so completely different problems but they keep the work with care.
My other work has been different to this kind of documentary. In my next project, I want to put a monitor in a shop window of a travel agent. I am asking a lot of people through the net to describe in words their place of birth and will add a text naming the town, place, country. It will be just text passing on the monitor, no sound. This could be said to be another approach to autobiography. The place of birth is always something very connected with your sense of self. I am again exploring whether or not it is possible to show meaning fully using a different method of presentation, the texts on a monitor.
Ettinger's film formed part of the Video Documentary Programme shown in the Ostranenie Festival. The other films in the same programme were:-
Copyright © : N.Paradoxa,1997
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.5, November 1997
