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At the end of Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse
(Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, 1984),
Dorian Gray walks through the underground sewer landscape
of Berlin and into the headquarters of the media group.
Slowly he unties a packet and takes out a knife, leaps
onto the conference table and stabs Frau Dr. Mabuse,
the director of the media group, in front of the assembled
media representatives who were in the process of reporting
their current circulation figures. In the next scene
we are in a cemetery where a camel is leading the
funeral procession. Frau Dr. Mabuse bows before the
grave: 'Dorian, for me you're still alive.' Next scene:
Dorian Gray reads the headline 'Dorian Gray dead'
in the Daily Mirror and says to his servant, Hollywood,
'Stop everything - I want to dictate the end of the
story.' In the credit sequence Dr. Mabuse speaks again
and asks the question: 'Why did I always have to kill
my most talented pupils?'
Ottinger's films, like all her artistic works, resist
linear readings: it is not possible to tell the story
of what happens in them because they do not follow
a linear plot. Instead every frame of the film is
carefully composed down to the tiniest detail as they
interweave multiple layers of meaning. The films are
full of references to literature, mythology, films,
music ethnology and history; they are full of discontinuities
and contradictions. Collage and montage, transformation
and metamorphosis are amongst Ottinger's most favourite
artistic methods and devices; the boundaries between
fact and fiction are blurred, as are the boundaries
between the sexes. Ottinger works with a visual (and
audible) language which constantly shifts and adjusts
in the attempt to do justice to the complexity of
the world we live in, displaying, ordering and presenting
it as if in a cabinet of curiosities. She is a brilliant
narrator, telling stories about people and the world
they live in. 'Cinema,' she says, 'is realised fiction,
bringing together the imagination of the filmmaker,
the power of the image and sequences of images, and
the imagination of the viewer.'2
Ulrike Ottinger not only directs her films but also
acts as cinematographer and producer. She started
out as a painter in Paris in the 1960s, and is also
a photographer, having developed a vast archive of
images over the years.3 She
also worked as a performer in the 1970s, and as a
theatre director, staging plays by Elfriede Jelinek
and Johann Nestroy, amongst others. Ottinger made
her first film, Laokoon & Söhne (Laocoon
& Sons), in 1973, and from the 1970s onwards she
has staged exhibitions alongside her film production.
Her screenplays are elaborate collections of photographs,
images, texts, quotations and sketches, clearly displaying
the artist's associative mode of working and her rigorous
method of research.
Ottinger's exhibition 'Stills' took place at David
Zwirner Gallery in New York in 2000 and 'Sessions'
at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin in 2001. In 2002
she took part in documenta 11 in Kassel with the 363-minute
documentary video Südostpassage, eine Reise zu
den neuen weißen Flecken auf der Landkarte Europas
(Southeast Passage, A Journey to the New Blank Spots
on the European Map). By this point Ulrike Ottinger
had finally achieved her breakthrough on the international
art scene - a breakthrough she had achieved as a filmmaker
in 1977 with her first long feature film, Madame X:
Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X - An Absolute
Ruler). Following Manifesta in Ljubljana in 2000,
documenta 11 was one of the most prominent examples
of the invasion of exhibition space by documentary
and semi-documentary videos. The art world's belated
'discovery' of Ulrike Ottinger in this context was
both timely and appropriate. Works by other filmmakers
such as Chantal Akerman and Harun Farocki were also
receiving increased exposure in the artistic world
at the same time. On the one hand this was connected
with a trend towards conformity in the production
of cinema and television films - a trend these filmmakers
were (and are) resisting. On the other hand, artistic
practices referring to the history of film and documentary
practice already had become established in the art
world in the previous few years - the work of Stan
Douglas or Diana Thater, for example. This created
a receptive environment for the work of Ottinger and
others, and prepared galleries and their visitors
for this exacting style of filmmaking. In the exhibition
'Hautnah' (Up Close) at Goetz Collection at Munich's
Villa Stuck, Ottinger's photographs Im Kontext von
Freak Orlando (In the context of Freak Orlando, 2002)
were shown alongside works by Chantal Akerman, Matthew
Barney, Robert Gober, Jürgen Klauke, Yayoi Kusama,
Cindy Sherman and others, framing them within the
context of the art world.4
Ulrike Ottinger has made twelve long films in all,
six of which could be described as documentaries.
Here I will be focusing on four early feature films
- Madame X - An Absolute Ruler (1977) and the Berlin
trilogy comprising Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket
of No Return, 1979), Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian
Gray - along with the recently released documentary,
Prater. If we subscribe to the thesis that history
must constantly be rewritten from the perspective
of the present, then today rewriting the history of
'the modern' and modernism is a matter of particular
urgency: the history familiar in the West was written
in the spirit of the Cold War, and has very particular
political, geographic and gender-specific points of
emphasis.5 If we also take seriously
documenta 12's attempt to begin this rewriting, focussing
in particular on areas such as the 1970s and the production
of art by women artists in different regions of the
world, then within this discourse Ulrike Ottinger's
early feature films seem to me both interesting and
illuminating.
Madame X - An Absolute Ruler was produced in the
spirit of second-wave feminism. Ottinger tells a pirate
story; it is a story of personal and social emancipation,
but also of power, domination and imprisonment within
an enclosed space. Eroticism and sexuality play a
pre-eminent role in the narrative. Seven women from
different geographic regions and different social
spheres follow the call of the 'harsh, pitiless beauty'
Madame X, who promises them discovery, gold, love
and adventure on the sea. They are 'willing to exchange
their comfortable and secure but unbearably dull lives
for a world of danger and uncertainty, but full of
love and adventure'.6 And so
they board the pirate ship Orlando (named after Madame
X's late lover) on the China Sea. The ship's figurehead
is an exact reproduction of Madame X, a robotic figure
who represents the apparatus of power. Because the
female seafarers gather here they accept this system.
They experience many adventures and become entangled
in countless erotic intrigues among themselves. In
the battle for supremacy - which is primarily sexual
in nature - Madame X kills nearly all the women. They
return to the boat in various forms and put out to
sea once more. 'At the end of the film all the figures
are transformed, they undergo various deaths in the
spirit of the pirate genre, they are stabbed, strangled,
whatever. The deaths are transitional stages. Something
has to die so that something else can come into being….
The film begins and ends with a departure. But the
circumstances have changed.'7
This film was initially received with some scepticism
by the women's movement: although it did express the
mood for heading in a new direction and for casting
off the traditional, repressive structures under which
women suffered, at the same time it showed the women
stumbling into new structures of a similar kind. Nonetheless,
it quickly became a cult film, especially in the USA,
with countless pirate copies in existence.8
The Berlin trilogy starts with Ticket of No Return.
This film, too, begins with a departure - this time
by a lone woman, another exceptional beauty like Madame
X. She leaves the Villa Rotonda and travels to Berlin
with a ticket aller jamais retour (a no-return ticket).
'She wanted to forget her past, or rather to abandon
it like a condemned house.'9
Now she wanders through Berlin, drinking. Colour plays
a central role in the drama of the film, which concentrates
mainly on the primary range. The clothes of the protagonist,
who is called 'She' (played by Tabea Blumenschein),
change from red to yellow to blue. In the final scene,
the death scene, she walks down a mirrored corridor
in a silver dress and the mirror floor shatters beneath
her white stilettos. 'This is an image for the transitional
situation between life and death,' says Ulrike Ottinger.10
In this film she very consciously works with claustrophobic
fantasies: glass doors that do not open, liquids on
glass and reflections in mirrors play all a major
role. As she says, 'I was trying to find images for
the reflective, the flowing, the dissolving.'11
Freak Orlando, Kleines Welttheater in fünf Episoden
(Freak Orlando, a small 'theatre of the world' in
five episodes) is 'a history of the world from its
beginnings to our day, taking the example of freaks,
including the errors, the incompetence, the thirst
for power, the fear, the madness, the cruelty and
the commonplace, as a small "theatre of the world"
in five episodes.'12 From the
mythology festival in the department store at the
beginning and through to the 'ugly person of the year'
competition in Italy via a religious festival, the
main figure Orlando develops through various stages
- from Orlando the pilgrim to Frau Orlando the entertainer
(played by Magdalena Montezuma) - accompanied throughout
by Helena Müller as Tree of Life Goddess, the
department-store announcer, Siamese-twins Lena and
Bunny Helena (Delphine Seyrig) and Herbert Zeus as
the department-store manager, priest, chief psychiatrist
and psycho-pharmaceuticals salesman (Albert Heins),
who finally wins the 'ugly person of the year' competition
as the only 'normal person'. The story takes place
in Berlin, the Freak City, and is set frequently in
the city's industrial areas with the Wall visible
as a symbol of separation and imprisonment. This journey
through history is marked by constantly repeating
cycles. As Ottinger says, 'Inquisition, fascism, repressive
psychiatry. The various methods of repression available
change according to the time. But the structures in
fact remain frighteningly similar.'13
Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press is
the third film of the Berlin trilogy. It tells the
story of a wealthy dandy, Dorian Gray (Veruschka von
Lehndorff) - a bored young man who falls into the
clutches of Dr. Mabuse (Delphine Seyrig), the head
of a media group who builds him up into a celebrity
and then destroys him. The story is inter-cut with
an opera which relates the conquest of the Canary
Islands by the Spanish Infant Don Luis de la Cerda
(also played by Veruschka von Lehndorff alias Dorian
Gray); it tells the tale of his encounter with the
beautiful local ruler Andamana (Tabea Blumenschein)
and how she is murdered by the Grand Inquisitor (also
played by Delphine Seyrig alias Dr. Mabuse). Dorian
Gray falls in love with the actress who plays Andamana,
and the intrigues of this love story are followed
by the tabloid press, which is presented as the modern-day
Inquisition. The end of the film has already been
discussed. Like the three ladies who accompany the
Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute (1791), Dr.
Mabuse has three companions - Susy, Golem and Passat,
the names referring to computer programmes for monitoring
circulation figures across the globe. Hollywood, Dorian
Gray's servant, is - as he says - both mother and
father to him. The press headquarters, where the latest
circulation figures are displayed on many monitors
connected to kiosks all over the globe, is a very
impressive setting - as is the room where the press
ball takes place, its surface made entirely of newspaper
and decorated with huge mounds of scrunched-up newsprint.
Here again we encounter a woman as absolute ruler,
representing the power of the media groups. '[T]he
tabloid newspapers exert not so much a direct force
as a temptation. The temptation is to make use of
these media - media which suppress important information.
"Politics is our taboo, X = U, X = U" (quotation
from a song at the press ball in the film). Here a
number of factors come together in a very dangerous
way: people with intelligence making use of psychology
solely to achieve higher circulation figures. This
is currently replacing a whole philosophy today -
the drive to achieve dominance of the international
market, and in a very skilful way.'14
The Berlin Trilogy shows three very different stories:
the story of one woman who is trapped within herself;
the history of the repression of particular groups;
and finally the analysis of a contemporary system
of power.
To conclude I will take a look at Ottinger's most
recent film, Prater, which premiered in February this
year. As an example of a documentary, this film provides
a connection with Ulrike Ottinger's current production
- although I am aware that I am missing out some important
intervening works.15 After Ottinger's
epic documentaries - China. Die Künste der Alltag
(China. The Arts - The People, 1985), Taiga (1992)
and Southeast Passage - which are huge landscape and
cultural panoramas lasting as much as eight hours,
Prater is a small-scale piece of just 104 minutes,
a fast-moving sequence of images, finely worked in
all its details. The course of one day, from midday
through to night, in today's Prater Park in Vienna,
which is threatened with closure, is interwoven with
its history, its music, its appearances in literature,
film and photography. The Wurstelprater funfair within
the Prater is the world's oldest amusement park, founded
by Nikolai Kobelkoff, a Russian without arms or legs
who fell in love with a Viennese woman. Brief excerpts
from Freak Orlando, including the dwarves and the
lady without arms and legs - almost like a sister-figure
for the park's founder - connect these characters
with the kind of place where they have always been
at home. Several journeys through the Ghost Train
and a ride on the Ejection Seat, interviews with Prater
families about the history of their family businesses,
special appearances from Elfriede Gerstl, Elfriede
Jelinek and others, are combined in a panorama of
the park's 100-year-plus history. For decades the
Prater was a place where young people were taken to
celebrate after their confirmation. In 1905 a merry-go-round
owner opened Vienna's first silent movie theatre here,
which later became the first talking movie theatre.
'The attractions here are called "illusion businesses"
and that's true of cinema as well. It, too, works
with the strategy of enticement, to which the viewer
must add his own imagination to make it work. With
this film in particular I thought anew about the themes
of illusion and imagination, imitation and simulation,
or techniques of simulation. Early cinema was a cinema
of attractions, and it was born in the travelling
carnival.'16 In the film, undercutting
the documentary process, Barbarella (Veruschka) appears
as an evil Barbie doll, shoots a small monkey with
her bow and arrow and throws herself into the arms
of a black monster, which is followed by a scene showing
a King Kong puppet show. In Ulrike Ottinger's words:
'The fiction comes frighteningly close to reality,
and reality is a construction, sometimes an illusion.'17
The same is true of Ottinger's entire oeuvre, and
especially of the relationship between her documentaries
and fictional films. In genre terms there is a clear
division between the two categories: on the one hand
the landscape, the towns and the people are the protagonists;
on the other the people and landscapes are created
by the artist's imagination. Yet Ulrike Ottinger insists
that these are not fantasies but very real observations:
'My imagination intervenes by connecting the different
things with each other.'18 Ottinger's
documentary method is characterised by attentiveness
and respect for others: the films often exhibit a
slowness which gives nature and people the time they
need to unfold.
Many of Ottinger's films, including the fictional
ones, are stories of journeys, narrating a departure
for new and entirely unfamiliar shores. These shores
are dangerous - places where power, violence and cruelty
lie in wait. The stories tell of love and sexuality
- not hetero-normality but the normality of other
gender definitions and sexual practices. They tell
of beauty and the beauty of what is often labelled
as ugly, the physically or socially marginalised,
the forgotten, the dwarves, the entertainers and transvestites.
Ottinger tells of the breadth of the landscape, the
chaos of the cities, the beauty and diversity of markets,
of music and literature. She creates a repertoire
of figures, many of whom we meet again in different
films: the drinking woman with the shopping trolley,
the three women (who may appear as conference delegates,
Dr. Mabuse's assistants, or as three naked men, the
dying virtues of the free press), people with bird
heads, birds with human heads, the twins Right and
Left, the Siamese twins, the two-headed woman, the
woman without arms and legs, the Tree of Life (a naked
woman who grows out of the ground with branches sprouting
from her arms), the narcissist looking into a mirror,
the two old men in black robes who stroke each other's
beards, or the naked dwarf leading a huge mastiff
on a leash, both of them spotted like Dalmatians.
Ulrike Ottinger's films are themselves like journeys:
you have to enter into them and enjoy them, knowing
that you will never be able to understand and decode
them entirely. They are like operas or theatre plays,
because they always show the frame, the viewpoint,
the presence of the author behind the camera and her
questions, the artificial and the constructed. They
are a huge sensual pleasure; they tell not only of
beauty, seduction and sexuality but also of power
games, violence and torture, of proximity and distance,
of the present and its history. They attempt to find
images for the complexity and increasing invisibility
of the world's hidden structures.
Translated by Susan Mackervoy
1 Oscar Wilde, quoted by Ulrike Ottinger
in the screenplay for Madame X - An Absolute Ruler.
Ulrike Ottinger, Drehbuch zu Madame X - eine absolute
Herrscherin, Basel and Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld
and Roter Stern, n.d.
2 Ulrike Ottinger, 'Der Zwang zum Genrekino', Kinemathek
86, Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, February
2001, p.40.
3 See Ursula Blickle, Matt Gerald and Catherine David
(eds.), Ulrike Ottinger: Image Archive, Nürnberg:
Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2006.
4 See also Laurence A. Rickels, 'My last interview
with Ulrike Ottinger', in Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour
(eds.), On the Foreignness of Film, Cambridge and
London: MIT Press: 2004, pp.422-36.
5 An argument proposed, for example, by Viktor Misiano
at the Lunch Lecture at documenta 12 in Kassel on
10 July 2007.
6 U. Ottinger, Drehbuch zu Madame X - eine absolute
Herrscherin, op. cit., n.p.
7 'Ein Werkstattgespräch. Die Collage ist die
Form, in der man heute denkt, Ulrike Ottinger im Gespräch
mit Peter Kremski' (Workshop conversation: Collage
is the form we think in today. Ulrike Ottinger in
conversation with Peter Kremski), Kinemathek 86, op.
cit., p.289.
8 Ibid., p.288.
9 See www.ulrikeottinger.com (last accessed 1 August
2007).
10 'Ein Werkstattgespräch', op. cit., p.281.
11 Ibid.
12 www.ulrikeottinger.com.
13 'Ein Werkstattgespräch', op. cit., p.285.
14 Ibid., p.165.
15 Such as Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia, which Homay
King discusses in this issue.
16 Ulrike Ottinger, interview with Stefanie Schulte
Strathaus, 2007, www.ulrikeottinger.com.
17 Ibid.
18 Ulrike Ottinger interviewed by Jochen Brunow, Kinemathek
86, op. cit., p.107.
Originally printed in Afterall
Issue 16, Autumn/Winter 2007, pp.29-36
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