The Cosmos According to Ulrike Ottinger

Features—

Jul 26, 2022

Berlin-based filmmaker and visual artist Ulrike Ottinger recently turned eighty. Leading up to the occasion, she’s had her share of honors, including the prestigious Berlinale Camera in 2020 and an exhibit in Baden-Baden entitled Cosmos Ottinger. The grandiose title pays homage to the artist’s prodigious imagination; she excels at on-screen pomp and circumstance and intricate, ethnographic detail. Ottinger’s work comprises a series of legendary, baroque queer pageants from the 1970s and ’80s—her breakthrough, Ticket of No Return (1979), is a fashion-forward drinking tour of a then-divided Berlin—and a corpus of beautifully shot, immersive travelogues. In Taiga (1992), for example, we accompany a band of Mongolian nomads over a year’s migration and an eight-hour-plus running time. Ottinger’s long career, and her long movies, have attracted fervent devotees across decades, continents, and genres. But, in part due to the challenges of assessing Ottinger’s unique contribution to film history—starting with the challenge of accessing the work itself—this current recognition is distinctly overdue.

Assemblages of often densely referential tableaux, rituals, and performances shot on location in places layered with disjunctive cultural histories, of considerable length and ambiguous point of view, Ottinger’s films defy the narrative payoff and audience turnover requirements of theatrical exhibition. Her work has never been easy to see outside festivals, museums, and universities (Women Make Movies is a longtime U.S. distributor). It is, however, easy to look at; unlike many other feminist filmmakers of the 1970s who, following Laura Mulvey’s analysis, were suspicious of visual pleasure in film, Ottinger has always embraced, even prioritized, its seductions. As we learn in Ottinger’s most recent film, the autobiographical documentary Paris Calligrammes (2019), the artist started out as a painter, specializing in a colorful cousin of pop art in Paris in the ’60s. Exquisite color and careful composition unite the elaborate set pieces of fiction films like Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984) and the magnificent vistas of nonfiction works like Chamisso’s Shadow (2016), which retraces a nineteenth-century arctic voyage of discovery. Ottinger has always been her own cinematographer; the photographs she takes on location of each of her productions are exhibited in museums and galleries and published in works like Ulrike Ottinger: Image Archive, and her films’ deliberate pace showcases each shot composition and mise-en-scène as if it were a still image.

However, it would be disingenuous to imply that the two strains of Ottinger’s work are equivalent in the kinds of cinematic visual pleasure on offer. Her imaginary worlds make a spectacle of bodies, while her documentaries put bodies in spectacular contexts. As Mulvey so memorably argued, classical narrative cinema’s pleasures depended upon the fetishistic display of the female form. Ottinger’s bold experiment was to reject classical narrative form and explore the possibilities of female visual pleasure—centered around the fetishistic display of Tabea Blumenschein, at the time Ulrike’s partner and collaborator.

Blumenschein died in 2020 and is remembered as an influencer in Berlin’s underground culture and Ottinger’s lifelong friend. But she was an artist in her own right—actor, costume designer, makeup artist. The two women codirected the rarely screened 16 mm black-and-white Laocoon & Sons (1975), in which Blumenschein stars as the shape-shifting Esmerelda del Rio, practicing what the voice-over calls “blonde magic” in a mythical country of women (including transwomen). As the lady drinker (“trinkerin”) in Ticket of No Return and designer of the film’s almost architectural costumes, Blumenschein brought her own ideas about archetypal femininity to the screen. Her extraordinary performance, which involves pantomime and a transgender alter ego, makes Ticket of No Return one of Ottinger’s best-known and most rewarding films. Picking up a homeless alcoholic (Lutze), the nameless “She” leads the way through Berlin’s premier drinking establishments; when the two women are thrown out of a bourgeois café room, they end up at a bohemian hangout with Nina Hagen. All the while they are followed by a trio of moralizing women in houndstooth suits. For while Blumenschein is the avatar of Woman, of to-be-looked-at-ness, in Ottinger’s films there are always multiple women, multiple ways of doing gender.

The lesbian auteur is a rare figure, perhaps especially now that both terms risk being superseded—lesbian by queer; auteur by brand. But Ottinger’s unique and important place in the New German Cinema and in film history more broadly is found at just that intersection. While her identities overlap with a transnational cohort of feminist and queer filmmakers, the way they inform her artistic expression is exceptional. Ticket of No Return was followed by the even more fancifully art-directed and episodic Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, completing what Ottinger calls her Berlin Trilogy, in which the fantastical and the city’s built environment mingle center stage. Both films showcase European art-cinema divas made iconic in the gay wing of New German Cinema—Magdalena Montezuma in the work of Werner Shroeter and Irm Hermann in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films—as part of a feminist aesthetic. The queerness of Freak Orlando’s cavalcade of circus performers and martyred saints is topped off by a chorus of twelve leather boys. In Dorian Gray, legendary ’60s supermodel Veruschka (Blow-Up) plays the lead as an operatic trouser role, a male part performed by a woman. And in Delphine Seyrig as Dorian’s honey-voiced corrupter, Frau Doktor Mabuse, Ottinger finds another defining collaborator. Shaking off the trappings of the eternal feminine from her signature role in Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Seyrig had become a feminist media activist who cofounded the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir to produce and archive feminist video. In addition to Ottinger, Seyrig worked with key European women directors Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, and Chantal Akerman, for whom she performed the indelible title role of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). But in drawing out inter- and extratextual meanings of these extraordinary performers as if the women themselves were mythological figures, refusing to absorb them into psychologized roles, Ottinger pursues a strategy markedly different from the feminists who formed another subset of New German Cinema. Margarethe von Trotta bases her characters on historical figures in Marianne and Juliane (1981), and Helke Sander’s The All-Around Reduced Personality: Redupers (1978), about a woman photographer’s coming to consciousness, also opts for realism, offering a very different vision of Berlin than Ottinger’s enchanted, sometimes nightmarish, cityscape. Finally, in the context of international feminist and LGBTQ filmmaking, Ottinger also departs from the bodies and nature imagery of Barbara Hammer, arguably the best-known of lesbian auteurs. Ottinger, rather, traced her genealogy through baroque art, decadence, dada, and drag.

Ottinger’s place in feminist, New German, and LGBTQ cinema is undisputed. Yet the protagonist’s death wish in Ticket of No Return offended feminists seeking empowering images, and the band of self-flagellating leather gays in Freak Orlando continued the provocation. Such content makes Ottinger a harbinger of the concerns of queer theory, especially what’s been called its “antisocial thesis,” which embraces all that is unassimilable about queerness to normative society, including the death drive. Ottinger’s imaginative early feature, Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1977), in which Blumenschein plays a dual role as a sadistic pirate queen and an automaton in fetish wear fixed to the ship’s prow, drew feminist ire for its power games. However, the film soon found a defender in the pages of the influential feminist journal Frauen und Film; its author, Monika Treut, would go on to direct Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985, with Elfi Mikesch) and a series of lesbian sex-, BDSM-, and trans-positive films for feminist audiences in the ’80s and ’90s.

Madame X, shot on 16 mm with post-sync (and very creative) sound on a makeshift vessel on Lake Constance near Ottinger’s familial home, imagines women banding together as an outlaw act. The titular pirate queen lures a crew of allegorical figures—the housewife Betty Brillo (Lutze), the artist Josephine de Collage (Yvonne Rainer), the outdoorsy German Flora Tannenbaum (Claudia Skoda), et al.—with a promise of “gold, love, and adventure.” As it turns out, even in a world free of patriarchal prescriptions, gendered and sexual power plays are reproduced on board. More disturbingly, these are overlaid with colonialist fantasies. At sea, the crew picks up the topless “Tahitian” Noa-Noa (Roswitha Janz) and sends her to mollify the pirate queen’s cruelty. Most of the crew perish on the voyage. However, transformation is the theme of this film and arguably of Ottinger’s corpus—in a charming if questionably Orientalist cameo she plays Madame X’s lost lover Orlando, one of the filmmaker’s frequent nods to Virginia Woolf’s novel on the same theme. Led by the stowaway castrato Belmondo (Mackay Taylor), the ship puts into “port” at the tourist waterfront to collect a new crew. Among the resurrected characters, Flora Tannenbaum comes back in blackface makeup and striped pajamas, pushing a broom. Here another strain of feminist critique of Ottinger’s work, around cultural appropriation and objectification, comes to a head, and contemporary viewers will find this figure unambiguously racist. All of the cast are presented as emblems rather than characters with psychological depth (or even lines of dialogue), but the Tahitian and Black caricatures, like the Orientalist fantasy that informs the entire adventure—Madame X, her ship, Orlando, and her faithful servant Hoi Sin are presented as “Chinese”—carry much more cultural weight.

Still, Ottinger’s conscious work with stereotypes—limited as it may be by its German avant-garde, camp sensibility—presents a challenge to our current time, when the concept of representation tends to mean who gets to appear in, speak for, and make films about whom. Indeed, the view of the cultural other is the central challenge and concern across Ottinger’s oeuvre, and it provides both a thematic and a philosophical link between the fiction and the documentary films that have been her main focus over the last three decades, in part due to funding constraints. Whether taking ethnic kitsch seriously (as in Prater, about Vienna’s nineteenth-century pleasure park) or embedding with a band of nomads, Ottinger trusts the camera to gaze without judgment or commentary. Although she refuses to intrude on the viewer with extensive explanation, the director is nothing if not erudite about the cultures she engages in her work. Since childhood, Ottinger has been an armchair Orientalist, a student of the languages and cultures of the Orient, in the German tradition that flows into what Edward Said diagnoses as a wider discourse on the East that serves the West both materially and symbolically. In Paris Calligrammes we get the ur-story of the young Ottinger’s meeting with Fritz Mühlenweg, adventurer and author of the 1950 children’s classic Big Tiger and Christian: Their Adventures in Mongolia, a meeting arranged by her father, a collector himself who had traveled as a sailor. The filmmaker did a deep dive into histories of Chinese female pirates and South Pacific ethnomusicology for Madame X, and more recent films explore traditional Korean wedding customs and work with kabuki performers to stage tales of Japan’s far northern snow country. The superimposition of past and present, here and there, is of perpetual interest to the filmmaker.

While questions of exoticism and cultural othering are salient across Ottinger’s oeuvre, they are addressed with the most complexity in the context of what may be her magnum opus, Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989). Featuring Seyrig in her last film role, as Lady Windermere, a cultured European anthropologist proficient in Mongolian, the ambitious project was the first Western film to obtain permission to shoot in Mongolia. Contrasted with the observational Taiga (1992), which followed it, Joan is also the film in which fiction and documentary come together most compellingly.

Joan’s first third takes place aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, a rolling museum of nineteenth-century Europe and its contact zones. The characters are again emblems, a society of women accompanied by a flamboyant fellow traveler in the form of composer Peter Kern as Mickey Katz, Yiddish stage star and epicure. Irm Hermann returns, here as a German tourist clutching her Baedeker guide. In part a stand-in for the director, Lady Windermere shares her wisdom (and soon her compartment) with Giovanna (Inés Sastre), a young backpacker and possible avatar of the maiden saint referenced in the film’s polyglot title. En route, the company is regaled by performances from Katz, Broadway star Fanny Ziegfeld (Gillian Scalici), and the Kalinka Sisters, a klezmer trio.

But the proceedings take a strikingly different turn on the Trans-Mongolian leg of the trip, when all seven female passengers are taken captive by the beautiful Princess Ulan Iga (Xu Re Huar) and her band of mounted female attendants. Is she the true referent of the film’s title? Certainly, the film aspires to legendary status. On the one hand, it is a triumphant feminist rejoinder to a desert epic like Lawrence of Arabia, with its charismatic Western “hero”; on the other, it offers as deconstruction what may be taken as decoration. Ottinger says in an interview: “It was not my intention to create exotic images. The film is concerned, rather, with the transport of culture. If exoticisms arise in the process, they are never identified with ‘the foreign’ per se but rather with the unsuccessful encounter with the foreign.”

The viewer comes along for the ride, watching as the nomads set up summer camp: elaborate greetings are recited; a shaman performs; a sheep is sacrificed; a yurt is erected—all in real time. Similar events take place in Taiga, but without the absurdist on-screen surrogates for the Western viewer, does the viewer attend differently? One might also ask whether performances filmed in real time on location in the Berlin Trilogy could be considered documentary footage. Spoiler: Joan ends with a plot twist that directly implicates the viewer’s ethnographic gaze. The “princess” turns out to be an urban dweller visiting the steppes to participate in a reenactment for a taste of the old ways. But this revelation does not diminish the encounter or resolve the ethical conundrum. Comparison to the “real” rituals in Taiga draws out how much on-screen events in both films reflect aspects of their own making: outsiders arrive, are offered and accept hospitality, provide an occasion for festivities, ceremony, collaboration. Over both modes of her filmmaking, Ottinger prioritizes the encounter. Her commitment is to both realism and the imagination.

Ultimately, the lure of adventuring has much to do with Ottinger’s queerness and her experience of gender. It is also linked to growing up in Germany in the immediate postwar period—born during the war, Ottinger was hidden for a time, with her Jewish mother, by her father’s parents. As with her learned Orientalist predecessors, the filmmaker seeks in part to “other” herself from an inheritance not of her choosing. In constructing a corpus as a lesbian auteur, she also draws liberally on gay male histories of connoisseurship, legends of women who refuse to stay in their place, and legacies of queers in exile.

A lesbian elder in bespoke three-piece suits, Ottinger nevertheless speaks to our contemporary moment, dissolving gender and other binarisms in her fictive worlds and committing to a global perspective in her documentary practice. Her oeuvre arrives before U.S. viewers with fanfare and the cultural baggage of contentious feminist, queer, and ethnographic debates around representation. Ottinger shares with us her singular vision, and it is remarkably capacious.

The Cosmos According to Ulrike Ottinger

The Cosmos According to Ulrike Ottinger

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