Freak Orlando A Film by Ulrike Ottinger |
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| Germany 1981 35 mm, color, 126 minutes Ulrike Ottinger Filmproduction, Berlin in Coproduction with Pia Frankenberg GmbH and ZDF, Mainz Premiere: November 1, 1981, 15th Hofer Filmtage Festivals: Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin 1982 Festivals in Madrid, Bologna, Bordeaux, Figueira da Foz, Montréal etc. Awards: Audience Award in Sceaux, France 1983 Prädikat: Besonders Wertvoll Distributed by Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek e.V. |
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| In
the form of a "small theater of the world", a history of the world from its beginnings to our day, including the errors, the incompetence, the thirst for power, the fear, the madness, the cruelty and the commonplace, in a story of five episodes. |
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| First Episode Where it is told how Orlando Zyklopa, with her seven dwarf-shoemakers, as special attraction at the instant shoe repair service at the Freak City department store, strikes the anvil; how she is driven away by Herbert Zeus, store manager; then, as queen of the seven dwarf-athletes, how she climbs up onto the Trojan Horse; and finally how she refuses to be the successor of the stylite, which leads to her death. Second Episode Where it is told how Orlando Orlanda, alias Orlando Zyklopa, is born as a miracle on the steps of a basilicum in the Middle Ages and, with her two heads, enchants those around her with a lovely song in two-part harmony; how she cannot prevent the flagellants from taking two acrobats prisoner and leading them out of the city in their procession, which leads her to pursue them with the famous dwarf Galli, a painter, up to the convent of Wilgeforte, the bearded woman saint; how she is dressed in new clothes in the department store warehouse; and how she undergoes an amazing metamorphosis while Galli paints her portrait. Third Episode Where it is told how Orlando Capricho, alias Orlando Orlanda, alias Orlando Zyklopa, has to admit that she has been captivated by a special travel offer made by the department store, announced by a seductive voice; how she learns distrust when she sees her mirror image; how she falls into the hands of the persecutors of the Spanish Inquisition at the end of the 18th century; how she has to undergo a thousand dangers and adventures, barely escaping internment in prison; and how she is finally deported with people of every description, which Galli El Primo illustrates faithfully. Fourth Episode Where it is told how Mr. Orlando, alias Orlando Capricho, alias Orlando Orlanda, alias Orlando Zyklopa, is engaged at the entrance to the psychiatric ward by the freak-artistes of a side-show traveling around the country; how he quickly falls in love with the left side of Siamese-twin sisters, named Lena, something the other, named Leni, cannot abide; which is why Mr. Orlando, entangled in a rather confusing affair, stabs Leni and thereby also inevitably kills Lena, whom he loved so much; and how the head of the troupe is forced to sentence Mr. Orlando to death in compliance with an age-old tradition of the artistes. Fifth Episode Where it is told how Mrs. Orlando, called Freak Orlando because of her special orientation, alias Mr. Orlando, alias Orlando Capricho, alias Orlando Orlanda, alias Orlando Zyklopa, is engaged as entertainer and tours Europe with four bunnies; how she is in great demand as an attraction for openings of shopping centers, family celebrations, etc.; how, finally she is engaged to host the show at the annual festival of ugliness; how she crowns the winner and bestows a trophy with the inscription: "Limping is the way of the crippled," and, at the end of the festival, we are told that the story is over. Excerpt from the catalogue to the exhibition Freak Orlando. Eine künstlerische Gesamtkonzeption DAAD-Galerie, Berlin, November 16 — December 21, 1982 Die Stationen des Orlando von den Anfängen der abendländischen Unvernunft in der Antike über das Mittelalter, das 18. Jahrhundert, die Jahrhundertwende und die Gegenwart sind als 'Histoire du monde' zu werten. Jenes 'teatrum mundi', das Earlyr nach dem Spielplan Gottes agierte, wird jedoch als 'circus mundi' entlarvt, unter dessen einstmals theologischem Baldachin sich abstruse Wunsch- und Angstträume, wilde Geißlergemeinschaften, willfährige Justiz der Kirchen und Könige gleichermaßen sammelten. Daher bedeuten die Metamorphosen Orlandos nicht nur abenteuerlichen Aufbruch, sondern sie sind zumeist von Mord, Gefangennahme, Verfolgung, lnquisition ausgelöst. Es wird bewußt, daß Orlando in seinen Streifzügen durch den Wahnsinn der Geschichte zugleich Gefangener seines eigenen Aufbruchs ist. Die fünfte Episode beschließt Orlando als weibliche Entertainerin auf einem ,Festival der Häßlichen', das tatsächlich, wie die Reporterin (Franca Magnani) zu berichten weiß, jährlich in Italien abgehalten wird. Auf diesem werden die zeitgenössischen Schönheitsideale ebenso nahtlos integriert wie die Politiker als Juroren. Der Wettbewerb der Außenseiter wird zu einem Tanz des Wahnsinns, der vergegenwärtigt, daß der Mensch um seiner Eitelkeit willen fähig ist, Häßlichkeit als Schönheit, Lüge als Wahrheit, Gewalt als Recht, Verkrüppelung als ,natürliche' Norm zu akzeptieren. Die Doppelbödigkeit dieser ,Kriterien' wird umso deutlicher, da der perfekt dressierte und angepasste Normalbürger als Sieger aus diesem Festival hervorgeht. Die Norm wird gekrönt. Der Narrentanz endet in idyllischer Hollywood Happy-End-Music, der Romanze zwischen dem Bunny und dem Gewinner des Wanderpokals. Der Spott des Wahnsinns unterhöhlt diese Szene, die ironische Verfremdung entlarvt diese Norm als realitätsnahe apokalyptische Erscheinung [...]. Wie sollte diese Reise Orlandos je beendet sein, da doch der Wahnsinn noch unter uns ist und die Apokalypse als Entertainment noch nicht an Attraktivität verloren hat! Hanne Bergius |
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| Myths Sprout from the Soil of Everyday Life This is no charitable film pleading tolerance for abnormal people. It operates with a number of tricks, but not the one most films count on - identification. It cites Tod Browning's famous 1932 film in which the cinema belies its ability to create illusions by an unimaginable display of real monsters. But this film is different. It redistributes the balance between real and artificial monstrosity. Plausibility is no problem. Its half-, double-, or non-people are not people just like me and you, neither are they better people. The head freak, the freak of the title, is based upon Virginia Woolf's Orlando, who realizes the age-old dream of androgyny. Like the Orlando of the novel, she/he is not subject to time and mortality. That alone would be enough to make him/her a monster of experience. Magdalena Montezuma, unrecognizable under a gloomy pilgrim's cowl in an apocalyptic dumpscape, sets the tone for the film with her first movements. We see right away that only a woman pretending to be a man walks that way. The closest ancestor in film history is Buñuel. Freak Orlando belongs to the genre of road movies represented by The Milky Way and charcterized by the cross section through time. In contrast to films with a linear narrative, these films are ahistorical, no matter how often they may invoke history. Lacking faith in progress, they express the conviction that however much the forms may change, superstition remains superstition. Instead of developing, events cluster and accumulate into a monumental story. Here, too, we encounter beggars and pilgrims, dwarves and stylites, bearded ladies and fetishists, and there are many wonders to astonish us. But where Buñuel demystifies myths by making them flesh, Ottinger's film is more a mythification of the modern. It is infected by its spatial proximity to old concepts and rituals. Despite excessive pictoriality, Freak Orlando is more a documentary than a fictional film. It documents collective fantasies. It shows that myths were always parasitical hybrid images in which dominant ideas took on solid form, without considering where they came from or where they were headed. Even in those places where we would most like to congratulate the director for her incredible inventions, we find, as she documents in the book to the film, that all of these things actually existed. The shell on the pilgrims' hat is a copy, and people with spotted skins are known in literature as panther men. As for her chickens with doll's heads, we have seen the originals in Browning's Freaks. Ugliness doesn't sell The cinema realizes surrealism's dreams of collage. Without film, the surrealists could never have conceived of their revolutionary metamorphoses. It is crucial to Ulrike Ottinger's concept of cinema that film can endow every notion, every desire, fear, and dream with the aura of reality. To put it pictorially, with film we can prove that myth is a living torso. In Freak Orlando the department store is the temple of promises, the meeting-place of the faithful, where public life regulates itself according to particular liturgies. Here norms are not only cemented, but relations to the past are exploited. Only the combination of the latest rage with old standbys produces the right special offer. The lovely Miss Helena Müller lends her siren's voice to department store publicity. Just as in the good old days, one must awaken expectations and create faith without seeming to do so. The scenes in the film function in a comparable way. They arouse associations in which the presumably natural is perverted by the artificial. If one had to describe the scenery of the second episode, in the Middle Ages, one could say without hesitation that it takes place before a cathedral entrance, where the theater of the world performs, although we can see perfectly well that all that stands behind the figures hungry for miracles and catastrophes is a derelict water-tower. These images, full of ambiguities as they are, give form to the aura of diffuse meanings in feelings for which no words exist. It is as if the usual exchange in cinema, in which the image represents reality, had come undone, transferring everything to the level of pictures; as if freefloating pictures existed that no longer imitate any model in nature. The already-loosened identification between object and representation breaks down completely where individual actors take on several roles. Delphine Seyrig plays a tree of life, the beautiful Helena, the mother of the two-headed Orlanda, a Siamese twin in a sideshow and, finally, a trained Playboy Bunny who dances in a competition of ideal ugliness. The film plays with old forms and the newest materials. In order to incarnate the idea of "bourgeois", Ulrike Ottinger combines statements about earning money with extravagant costumes of wax cloth recalling the Florence of the Medici. The film is one big masquerade, but one where it is precisely at the most seemingly artificial moments that we feel someone is actually parading his or her own skin. For example: a group of phallocrats dance over a mountain and Mother Earth has had to submit to a covering of artificial grass. The films of Praunheim and Schroeter have taught us to see and have reminded us of the existence of their films alongside the usual cinematic forms. Their images have always contained the refusal to accept as reality that which the norms dictated. What the figure of Freak Orlando heroically reveals and conceals is that in art, sexuality creates its own forms to express its relationship to the law, to legality and order. Frieda Grafe, Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 7/8, 1981 Die Dimension der emotionalen Aufladung der Bilder, die über das Verwundern hinausgeht, kommt dem Film vor allem über das Spiel Delphine Seyrigs zu, die neben Magdalena Montezuma als Orlanda / Orlando die wechselnden Episodenrollen durchläuft von der Lebensbaumgöttin, Mutter der doppelköpfigen Wundergeburt, siamesischer Zwillingshälfte, Kaufhausansagerin zum Bunny beim ,Wettbewerb der Häßlichen'. Während Magdalena Montezuma die Eiseskälte der Kunstfigur virtuos verbreitet, spielt Delphine Seyrig ihre Parts durchaus mit psychischem Profil, vermenschlicht mit fIatterndem Lächeln, zarten Blicken, sanftem Timbre das Künstliche zur weicheren Kontur der Person. Gertrud Koch, Frankfurter Rundschau, November 14, 1981 |
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Distribution: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek e.V. Potsdamer Str. 2 D-10785 Berlin Germany Contact: Karl Winter fon +49-30-269 55 150 fax +49-30-269 55 111 Sales: Available on VHS at Ulrike Ottinger Filmproduction |
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