D E S C R I P T I O N
Ulrike Ottinger’s documentary Prater (Austria-Germany), a half-decade in the making, chronicles over the past century and more the attractions that contributed to the rise and fall of the world’s oldest amusement park.(..)Read More »
Synopsis
Ulrike Ottinger, then a young painter, lived in Paris in the 1960s. Now a film-maker, she looks back on that time, weaving memories of the Parisian life and the upheavals of the time into a cinematic poem with the city at its center.Read More »
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Ulrike Ottinger’s epic adventure traces a fantastic encounter between two different worlds. Seven western women travelers meet aboard the sumptuous, meticulously reconstructed Trans-Siberian Express, a rolling museum of European culture. Lady Windemere, an elegant ethnographer played by the incomparable Delphine Seyrig in her last screen role, regales a young companion with Mongol myths and lore while other passengers-a prim tourist (Irm Hermann), a brash Broadway chanteuse and an all-girl klezmer trio-revel in campy dining car cabaret. Suddenly ambushed by a band of Mongol horsewomen, the company is abducted to the plains of Inner Mongolia and embark on a fantastic camel ride across the magnificent countryside. Breathtaking vistas, the lavish costumes of Princess Ulun Iga and her retinue, and the rituals of Mongol life are stunningly rendered by Ottinger’s cinematography. Dubbed a female Lawrence of Arabia and just as sweepingly romantic, Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia is a grandly entertaining, unforgettable journey.Read More »
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In THE BETRUCTION OF THE BLUE SAILORS, Tabea Blumenschein “plays four different roles in changing appearances and in fantastic costumes that structure the film: a mythical figure that permeates the film on desert sand with siren song; a bird that is killed; a Hawaiian girl and a Sailors. While the siren, accompanied by Asian music, strides along the desert, sailors and birds become the victims of perverted naturalness in the form of the wild Hawaiian girl.” (Claudia Hoff) In the collage principle, areas and quotations from commercialized everyday life and the music, which ranges from noises, sacred gongs, Hawaiian music, Schuricke melodies, musette waltzes to Burmese songs and cultic Ketchak rhythms, and the language – literary texts by Apollinaire, which already use the quotation method, phrases from the world of American show business (Hollywood veteran star), lamentations of a Russian silent film mother […], come satire, the grotesque, the caricature, the clown and the doll up; and it is the deep meaning of these forms of expression, through the demonstration of the marionette-ness, the mechanization of life, through the apparent and real torpor, to let us imagine a different life. (Raoul Hausman). (From the conversation between Ulrike Ottinger/ Tabea Blumenschein and Hanne Bergius)Read More »
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It starts with “Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story”, which tells of a man travelling the world in seven-league boots. Adelbert von Chamisso wrote the tale before setting off to Russia on scientific expedition in 1815. He analysed the flora of Alaska and then explored the Northwest Passage, just like Cook and voyager Bering had done previously, the latter with physician and naturalist Steller in tow.
A porthole reveals the view. Thus begins Ottinger’s journey from Alaska to Kamchatka via Chukotka, with her predecessors’ log books to accompany her on her way.Read More »
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Fascinating and rich with wry humor, Exile Shanghai is an extraordinary cultural odyssey that affectionately conjures up the lost Jewish world of Shanghai. In the dark days of the 1930s, the Chinese metropolis was the last refuge for Europe’s persecuted Jews—a place that did not demand a visa. Those who managed to find refuge there brought with them the social and gastronomic delights of Vienna and Berlin. Ottinger’s four-and-a-half-hour mosaic features interviews with former members of the Shanghai expatriate Jewish community (many of whom relocated to Northern California), and her ever-curious camera cruises the city in search of its lost synagogues, schools, and salons.Read More »
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From the panoramic, historical revue of the many faces of social prejudice and ostracism, Ottinger turns her attention to the mechanism of exclusion invested with the necessary power to make or break people. Frau Dr. Mabuse, whose illustrious precursor is Fritz Lang’s psychopathic, counterfeiting boss of the underworld, derives her power from the fabrication of reality based on the seduction of images and words. Her perfect object and victim is the Bauhaus-dandy Dorian, whose relation to Oscar Wilde’s prototype is as marginal as his relation to power. The fairy-tale framework of Ottinger’s feature compositions asserts itself strongly in this film as Dorian replaces the evil tycoon and becomes king of the media conglomerate.Read More »
“In 1962, as a young artist, I came to live and work in Paris. That period until 1969, when I left the city, was not only one of the most formative for me, it was also an era of intellectual, political, and social upheaval in modern history. The film Paris Calligrammes combines my personal memories of the 1960s with a portrait of the city and a social cartography of the age. Like Guillaume Appolinaire’s poetry collection ‘Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War’, I have given it the form of a filmic “picture-poem” (calligram) in which the words and images, complemented by language, sound, and music, form a mosaic that emerges from the vivacity of those exciting years while speaking to the fragility of all cultural and political achievements.” ––Ulrike OttingerRead More »
From a topographic perspective, Ulrike Ottinger’s cinema is mostly located between Berlin and remote places in the Far East or the Far North. In Paris Calligrammes, she explores the landscape of her memories of the city that she called home for 20 years and that helped shape her beginnings as a painter and filmmaker. Ottinger moved to Paris in her twenties and immersed herself in the cultural scene of the 1950s populated by heroes of the avant-garde and a new generation of artists and intellectuals. Read More »