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Laurence A. Rickels
Portrait of Ulrike Ottinger - Stations Of The Crossing
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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).
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 re-cognizably 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 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.
Ulrike Ottinger
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 Rosen-baum 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 reading or rendering, Berlin's
ready-made status as most ancient or primal city of our more recent
past and most traumatic history becomes visible in the architectural
settings of the city's latent history as a narrative of episodes cutting
through time and space. Inherent in this allegorical procedure is
the meta- morphosis required to make manifest the artist's reading
of urban relics. This forms the documentary subject of Usinimage,
which shows the Before and After pictures of Ottinger`s cinematographic
modifications of the Berlin locations. In Countdown the filmmaker
expands her approach to yet another kind of documentary perspective:
With a sort of "caméra stylo" she registers for ten
days leading up to the unification of German currencies the political
changes after 1989 in the every day life of Berlin, in the margins
at the center of the epoch-making ending of the Cold War.
If we consider Ottinger's regular collaboration with actress Delphine
Seyrig as a point of cohesion, then Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (which,
to add not only my own judgement as an update to Rosenbaum's 1983
call, is truly one of the masterpieces of world cinema) could be seen
to overlap with the trilogy. To mark this station of the journey,
the film juxtaposes the fictional film medium with that of documentary
film-making.
But the seeming split down the middle of the film between the film
artifact contained in the train crossing Siberia and the on- location
account of the sojourn of the abducted train passengers in the wide
open spaces of the Mongolian tribe's domain does not subsume all the
differences Ottinger has set into play. Just as the title of the film
speaks in three tongues, so the European train of association barely
contains itself, but already bursts out into celebration of radically
diverse and overlapping cultures well before the train has been stopped
in its tracks and the ‰documentary` section has opend up in its
place. Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia serves as reminder that it is impossible
or pointless to separate Ottinger's fiction films from her documentaries
(which now seem to comprise, as though Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia served
as a model, the second half of her "uvre).
Ottinger's next two projects, however, will return to the fiction
film genre. The Bloodcountess (Die Blutgräfin, cf. page 22) Ottinger's
ironic foray into the vampire film, will be set on such precursors
as Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers and Harry Kümel's
Daughters of Darkness. Diamond Dance, Ottinger's largest project to
date, juxtaposes the Shoah and the AIDS crisis within a melting plot
featuring the international diamond business, the underworld of Mickey
Marx, and a musical mix of klezmer and jazz.
Ottinger's cinema, which breaks for one station before moving on to
the next one, and in this move crosses the one with the other, is
the kind of journey that can only keep on beginning, again and again.
Laurence A. Rickels is the author of a study of Ulrike
Ottinger's films entitled "The Autobiography of Cinema".
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