Petra Lottje
Auf der Spur - on track
Many of Petra Lottje's films, on a first view, seem to plainly criticize the stereotyped depictions of women in media. In „Jedes Zimmer Hinter Einer Tür" (Every Room Behind A Door) Petra Lottje stages the female part of dialogues in diverse films, using the German dubbing voices and borrowing her lips to the sound like it is practice with the "playback mime singers" on TV. However, the lip-sync is not perfect in some parts, the settings seems not to fit correctly but still, and over time, the viewer gets the impression of honest enacting instead of parody. One reason for that impression may be the very understated acting of Petra Lottje. Her minimal gestures and mimic, reminding of Buster Keaton, leave ample space for projections by the viewer. (Buster Keaton's "poker face" was a novelty in cinema at that time. Some film critics see him as the starting point of modern cinema, where the actor on close-up shows only minimal expressions in order to become the mirror for emotional projections by the viewers). Thus over time of watching the film „Jedes Zimmer Hinter Einer Tür" and the programme as a whole, the acting of Lottje seems to become more and more "real".
It may come as a surprise that Petra Lottje selects the sound clips of German dubbings of mainstream movies mostly because she feels personally moved by those scenes. Consequently, if the viewer starts to identify emotionally with the female protagonist in the film, the categories of viewer perceptions start to twirl like a merry-go-round. Artist Lottje started to collect these kind of sound clips firstly in order to make sound installations, but then over time, she started to feel the need for some kind of visual representation and thus has turned herself to video as her media of choice, besides drawing, her other art practice. If taking a critical distance, we could summarize Lottje's strategy in art as a kind of "critique by affirmation". A strategy similar to Pop-Art embracing consumerism.
However, Lottje also takes a critical stance saying that Hollywood takes true scenes from real life and uses them in ways that we identify with these scenes even though they have become totally stereotyped. She also asks, why we seem to still identify with those scenes even though they are totally standardised. (The quotes she uses could be from a wide range of films, it is hard to identify the original source.) Do we live according to standardised schemes, most of them just adopted from Hollywood? The common Hollywood studio is a collaboration of many joint forces who add to the creative process of film production, especially in the case of the so called "producer's film" (a term that may only exist in German language) where a producer finds a story, buys the rights to make it into a movie, then looks for script writers and a film director who will realize the film together with production designers, make-up artists, light designers, sound engineers, cinematographer and special effect artists etc. In the (mostly smaller sized) dubbing studios, the content will be further altered, not only by interpretation of the text, but with changes in sound, changes in dialect (translation to standard German) and last not least by the timbre of the dubbing artist. Opposite to that concept is the idea of the artist as singular genius who decides everything and in the best of all cases manufactures everything with his own hands, a concept to be found in classic-modernist art, especially applied to painting and avant-garde filmmaking. Petra, though mostly the main actor/character in her own films, instead sees herself as part of the production chain of mainstream movies, completing it by her own selection and then re-enacting the story by giving her face to the dubbing voice. This idea of being part of the creative process of others also exists in her other films, particularly in "Vielleicht zu lange" (Possibly for too long time) and "OSA 2011". The first derived from a subtitled Japanese movie, and Petra has a couple of German actors speaking the subtitles, in their own rhythm and speed, thus the shown text and images had to be cut accordingly. In OSA she takes the text from a dissertation on technical sound absorption and uses it to describe a human condition of sound absorption.
There is other video work by Petra Lottje that is more based on camera images. A joyous family scene become the base for "Kunst ist schön, Alltag ist schöner" (Art is Beautiful, Daily Life is more Beautiful), which is the opening to the program. Pure observation in a short time period of diversion leads without much editing to the video "Freizeit" (Free Time), and even the illustrative images of "el momento" seems to be based on selfobservation, even though the text derives from Spanish lections. "Exploration" may even be the key word for Petra Lottje's work altogether. Even in the staged movies, the chosen scenes are taken under observational explorations. The transformations that happen by dubbing the dialogue into standard German help in this process. Furthermore, isn't it true that the reenactment by the artist can be less described as "taking on a role" but as an exploratory probing of the possible context of the chosen text?
© Klaus W. Eisonlohr, 2010