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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 Sons
(short, 1972/73), Berlin Fieber - Wolf Vostell (short,
1973), The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors (short,
1975), Madame X - An Absolute Ruler (1977),
Ticket of No Return - Aller jamais retour (1979),
Freak Orlando (1981), Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press
(1984), China. The Arts - The People (1985),
Superbia - Pride (short, 1986), Usinimage (short,
1987), Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1988), Countdown (1990),
Taiga (1992), Exile 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 - An Absolute Ruler,
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, Ticket of No Return, 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.
Ticket of No Return is the first part of Ottinger's
1980s trilogy, which continued with Freak Orlando and
concluded with Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press.
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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