German Filmmakers and Movies

Born in 1942, Ulrike Ottinger is one of the most internationally renowned exponents of German cinema. So it might come as a surprise that her work is far more widely known to people in the art scene than to the general movie-going public. In fact, her films, which date from the 1970s on, are often shown in connection with art exhibitions.

In 2002 her films,  Southeast Passage, A Journey to the New Blank Spaces on the Map of Europe (Südostpassage) and The Specimen (Das Exemplar), were presented at the documenta 11 in Kassel. That she was invited to take part in what remains the world’s premier exhibition event in the field of contemporary art attests to Ottinger’s repute as well as her intermediary position between cinema and the fine arts.

Grotesque transformations

Ulrike Ottinger is, to use a somewhat outmoded term, a cinematic artist in the literal sense. Her exceedingly artificial visual worlds contain a cornucopia of allusions to art history and literature, from the ancient statue of Laocoon with his sons and the legend of Joan of Arc to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. She uses these works as raw material for fantastical stories told with a visual opulence that reflects her predilection for costumes, masquerades and transformations of all sorts.

Ottinger’s very first film, Laocoon & Sons (Laokoon & Söhne, 1973), set the course she was to pursue in her subsequent work. It’s about the metamorphic quest of Esmeralda del Rio, who as a widow by the name of Olimpia Vincitor goes off in search of her past, shortly thereafter turns into ice-skater Linda MacNamara, and ends up taking on the male identity of a gigolo called Jimmy Junod. The continual metamorphoses catapult the viewer into a whirl of confusion in which nothing is final or permanent, nothing definite.

“Things are constantly occurring here that run counter to the strictures of theatre,” summarizes the narrator at a certain point in the film. This observation may also serve to characterize a leitmotif in all of Ottinger’s subsequent work, in which carnivalesque and commedia dell’arte scenes seasoned with a pinch of Baroque morbidity are interwoven with borrowings from science fiction movies to form a unique narrative blend – a blend that defies all conventional pigeonholing of style or genre.

Exploding gender categories

The attribute “feminist film”, for example, applies only to a limited extent. It’s true that most Ottinger pictures centre on exceptional women, as signalled by such titles as Madame X – An Absolute Ruler (Madame X – eine absolute Herrscherin, 1977) or Ticket of No Return (Bildnis einer Trinkerin, 1979). But Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse, 1983/84) is also about a woman, specifically a female Dr. Mabuse; and the protagonist of Freak Orlando (1981) is one Orlanda Zyklopa, with apologies to Virginia Woolf. From the outset, moreover, the filmmaker worked with an almost exclusively female crew. Tabea Blumenschein created the wonderful costumes and masks for many of Ottinger’s pictures, and actresses like Delphine Seyrig, Magdalena Montezuma, or Irm Hermann, who gained fame in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films, make multiple appearances in her works.

In spite of all that, Ottinger’s art cannot be reduced to a “model for an alternative female art world”, as persistently claimed by feminist critics. On the contrary, taken as a whole her oeuvre is more about exploding socially sanctioned gender categories of male and female. This bent is illustrated, among other things, by all the satyr-like figures, bearded ladies and other hermaphrodites and freaks that populate Ottinger’s visual universe.

Foreign parts: a traveller’s tales

In addition to her feature films, Ottinger has made a series of films about her travels that rank among the best that the contemporary documentary genre has to offer. They tell of foreign parts from the perspective of the familiar. Here again the dominant theme is transformation: the deliberately subjective perspective makes the foreign appear familiar and instead places our own culture and customs in a strange light. A penchant for oriental and Asian culture is unmistakable in her choice of subjects.

The above-mentioned Southeast Passage recounts a trip from Berlin to Eastern Europe. Taiga (1991/92) is an eight-and-a-half-hour record of Ottinger’s encounters in Mongolia, and Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989) chronicles a ride to Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian Railway from the points of view of four women. Particularly the latter, with the intense colours, beguiling sense of humour and at times almost surreal details of this captivating film, illustrates the fact that all perception is an act of translation. Ottinger quotes Oscar Wilde: “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible” – and formulates thus the motto of her nomadic visual voyages, which don’t claim to get to pierce the veil of appearances, but conversely to uncover the hidden sides of the visible.