Film/ Prater

The Merry-Go-Round is the heart of Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater”, a remarkable exploration of illusion and freedom, technology and desire, costumed as a documentary-style history of Europe’s original Amusement Park, located on the outskirts of Vienna.

As director, writer and cinematographer Ottinger literally becomes the carousel’s watchful center, a playful detective galloping in place to a frenetic calliope score, her gaze is loving and unflinching, as steady and sure as the slow and predictable path of the magic circle. What, she asks, is really going on here?

Each revolution allows the camera to lingeringly snap up new clues in multiple mug shots, accumulating myriad glimmering impressions interwoven, now and then, with vintage footage, tracking back and forth in time, cobbling together a full-scale portrait of the scene of the crime and its cast of characters- the park’s creators, workers, patrons, destroyers and a vast population of mechanical devices and automatons, old and new, that are the go-betweens, ambassador/guides as it were, to this no man’s land between propriety and imagination, brokered in profit.

The story begins with Nikolai Kobelkoff, born horribly deformed to normal parents in Siberia in 1851, without legs and with only one pointed stub of arm projecting from his right shoulder. Despite these impossible physical hardships and crushing societal and family pressures, a kindly schoolteacher teaches him to write by clutching a pen between his chin and arm-stump. Holding a brush in a similar manner, he learned to paint small landscapes; his proficiency eventually developed such that he could thread a needle.

Entrepreneurship is as old as mankind. Genghis Kahn knew that a worthless trinket from China could become a valuable and rare commodity thousands of miles away. So, centuries later, did the first Dutch settlers who “bought” Manhattan. Kobelkoff’s great vision and act of freedom was in seeing a different future for himself. With his hard-won “ordinary” accomplishments he could make himself into a marketable product; what others had tried to hide away he would parade in front of a clamorous public eager to pay for novelty and escape.

He became rich and acclaimed, married, sired numerous normal offspring and opened shop, as it were, in the Prater. The original display at the amusement park, nestled in a former Imperial hunting preserve, was not so unambiguous. In 1896 an entire tribe of Africans, the Ashanti, was transplanted to a corner of the park with all their worldly goods, including animals, housing structures and every commonplace necessity, recreating the illusion of daily life at their homeland village, exposed 24/7 to the amused, bewildered or startled surveillance of paying patrons.

With the addition of a Lilliputian Venice, complete with canals and campanile, the trend toward virtual travel had taken a new turn. The illusion of leaving home without the bother of packing a bag proved irresistible, and still is.

The park itself became extraterritorial to everyday life. Not only an attraction of exotic “otherness”, it was also capable of being a safety valve for the crushing pressures of an increasingly homogenized and complex urban life. It also served as a world of freedom for the roaming imagination, still sufficiently, if barely, disguised in a cloak of convention proper to its place and time. The discord of place and time creates its own kind of value and interest. Technology is always woefully behind or startlingly ahead, threatening to become old before our eyes as we figure out the illusion, even if we acquiesce willingly to its charms.

In Ottinger’s 21st century here and now at the theme park, African men, perhaps tourists, joyously compete in a toss-ball arcade game that animates jostling mechanical racehorses lurching to a bespangled Derby finish line. Multi-generational Middle Eastern families, posing for group portraits a la 1900, dress up in the colorful costumes of European Empires that oppressed their homelands and ancestors not so long ago.

Veruschka von Lehndorff, magnificently, if preposterously, garbed as Barbarella in a form-fitting silver and black body suit and blond wig the size of two roaring lions, wins a cuddly stuffed monkey at the Archery Arcade; her aim is true. Inside the House of Mirrors her steady gaze explores every distortion and permutation of form and meaning as her image and that of the toy monkey’s shape-shift, disappear and meld into one another. Oddly, she is the opposite of the 1920’s well dressed bourgeois city swells whose mimed gestures for the moving camera are so predictable and limited they are barely distinguishable from the legions of automatons repeating their tiny range of motion.

Other modern day characters describe varying degrees of personal fulfillment and satisfaction within the collective rituals of a bygone social existence. One woman recounts the delight of experiencing a freedom of thought, feeling and action brought to birth in the generous expanse of the Prater, a keen contrast to a crowded and constrained childhood. All too soon her practical mother sweeps it all away, forbidding her return to the Suspect Realm, fearfully certain that freedom of any kind will not lead to sensible citizenry or responsible worldly advantage.

In 1945 at the very end of the war retreating Nazis burned the Prater to the ground, unable and unwilling even in defeat to allow the existence of a place where races and classes mixed freely and imagination ran free. It was rebuilt with bumper cars and a space catapult ride. The punching bag with the shape and look of a man’s head is still very popular with gangs of young men proving their power and prowess, one euro at a time. The Prater is inextinguishable.