Titel Kino 2-2000 - German Films

Portrait of Ulrike Ottinger
Ottinger’s films explore a
world of difference defined
by the tension and transfer
between settled and nomadic
cultures. Ottinger’s sense of
this cultural transfer informs
her documentary and her
feature films. It is what marks
the stations of her encounter
with the other, whether recognizably
exotic or simply
but subtly unpredictable.
Nomadic cultures – archaic or
modern – occupy a margin
where reality, the future, or
the other uncontrollably
begins. Metamorphosis and
allegory are, accordingly,
hallmarks of Ottinger’s
visual language.
From her prehistory as visual
artist Ottinger brought to her
take on film the principle
of collage and an eye trained for
composition. But what in turn
drew her to film is that
it is constitutively a medium
of juxtaposition which can
thus best convey the present
tensions, for example, between
parameters of the historical and of the modern, between
stationary and moving perspectives, between global
panoramas and the miniature. Reflecting the status of
the medium as the high or late point of developments
Starting her visual arts career in Munich and Paris (painting, works on paper, photography, performance),
Ulrike Ottinger’s commitment to film took off with her move to Berlin, that archaeological site of
political and psychic projections which served her through the 80s as a major source of inspiration for
her exploration of the cinematic medium. The deconstructive momentum of Berlin is reflected in the
difference Ottinger’s films make. In her films difference does not stop short between units or unities
(those of cultural, national, or sexual identity, for example). In the encounter with the other, which these
films explore, self finds itself, beside itself, crossed with and crossing through the other. And that’s the
difference that sets Ottinger’s cinema apart.
Her film credits are: Laokoon und Söhne (short, 1972/73), Berlin Fieber – Wolf Vostell
(short, 1973), Die Betörung der blauen Matrosen (short, 1975), Madame X – Eine
absolute Herrscherin (1977), Bildnis einer Trinkerin – Aller jamais retour (1979),
Freak Orlando (1981), Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984), China.
Die Künste – Der Alltag (1985), Superbia – Der Stolz (short, 1986), Usinimage
(short, 1987), Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1988), Countdown (1990), Taiga (1992), Exil
Shanghai (1997).
STATIONS OF
THE CROSSING
Ulrike Ottinger
beginning with the printing
press, Ottinger makes her
movies at the stations of the
crossing of the legible with the
irreducibly visual, of narrative
with tableau.
Her first feature, Madame
X – Eine absolute
Herrscherin, prefigures all
her subsequent movies. It
made Ottinger a sensational
figure of controversy. This
ostensible „lesbian-feminist
pirate film“ in turn challenged
certain assumptions of feminist
politics by keeping its focus
fixed on the troubling doubling
of gender. Her next feature,
Bildnis einer Trinkerin,
which Jonathan Rosenbaum
judged in 1983
to be “an uncategorizable
masterpiece so sui generis
that influences seem hardly
relevant at all to the synthesis
achieved“, established her
reputation as one of the
leading European art
cinema directors.
Bildnis einer Trinkerin is the first part of Ottinger’s 1980s
trilogy, which continued with Freak Orlando and concluded
with Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse. The
Berlin setting holds these films together. In Ottinger’s allegorical
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