The lesbian auteur is a rare figure, perhaps especially now that both terms risk being superseded—lesbian by queer; auteur by brand.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.

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.