Our column Panorama seeks to call into question current films, classic masterpieces, remakes, the evolution of the genres, social situations reflected in films. 

One World Romania dedicates a retrospective to Ulrike Ottinger, so we take this chance, like many other critics before us, to decipher Ottinger’s surrealism – how can we describe and relate it to the feminist cinema of the ‘70s? Does it make sense to pack it in little boxes and send it out into the world? How do we approach such idiosyncratic films?

1 ) the spark, the artifice

American critic Susan Sontag wrote in her 1964 essay Notes on “Camp” that talking about Camp automatically implies an act of betrayal – talking about Camp means demystifying it, decoding it, and thus reducing it to something recognizable, something palpable. I turned Ulrike Ottinger’s films on all sides looking for some familiarity; so many critics have fallen into this trap. One thing is for sure: the most accurate term to somehow summarize the phantasmagoric universe of the German filmmaker and bring it closer to something that feels familiar is Camp. If Sontag defined Camp in relation to all sorts of references – Greta Garbo’s androgyne, Oscar Wilde, or Swan Lake, to name a few examples – Ottinger’s Camp is sometimes excessive, corny, meaty (in Freak Orlando (1981) and Madame X (1978)), as is Fellini’s or Vera Chytilova’s Camp. The world created by Ottinger is full of plastic objects, rubber covers, fabricated things – a train station with painted passengers, steam coming out of a fake liquor, a shoe repair service where they make invisible soles for mythological shoes. It’s hard to put your finger on something, chances are it will turn to fairy dust and vanish into thin air – or this is one of the essences of Camp, it’s an artifice, a blinding spark, an oversized heel on a red shoe. And, of course, androgyny and drag, which are ever-present in Ottinger’s work.

Ottinger’s films have earned a scandalous reputation for being irreverent pastiches that play on viewers’ expectations. First of all, the titles are sometimes bluffs – Laokoon & Söhne/Laocoon & Sons (1975) has little to do with the statue of the same name, much less with Laocoon himself, the Trojan priest punished by the gods; in Ottinger’s film, it’s the generic name given to a group of circus people that cross a fictional city. It’s the same with Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia/Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989), where a group of Western women is taken hostage by a group of female-only Mongol warriors, and the so-called Johanna D’Arc is just a young Francophile who bursts with delight discovering the Mongolian exotic culture: she flirts with their princess, rides wild horses and shoots arrows. Searching for meaning in the universe of Ottinger’s idiosyncrasies is a trap. However, the German filmmaker does leave some (ginger)bread crumbs here and there, which are to be found in most of her films: the close connection with two queer literary works, Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, and The Portrait of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, the protagonists’ journey (both outer and inner, but especially inner, when it comes to the metamorphosis of the heroines in Freak Orlando and Laocoon, who over time acquire as many identities as they desire), as well as a kind of insatiable appetite for everything that has to do with the overthrow of idols (and here it also has to do with ars poetica, that is, to eradicate a filmmaking standard, and it’s about addressing subjects that will cause a stir among the audience – PS: for example, a crucified, bearded woman who plays black metal is blasphemy in at least two religions I know of). That being said, the effort of justifying the interest in such a filmmaker seems useless: to write about and (re)discover Ulrike Ottinger is a joy that any cinephile should have in mind. And if in the ’60s-’80s period Ottinger was too wickedly subversive, too atypical (and, why not, too feminist) for the New German Cinema to come up front and stand next to filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, or Alexander Kluge, time has done her justice (or at least was kinder to her), and she is often enough celebrated in the form of retrospectives.

2 ) the element of surprise: Virginia Woolf

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf writes the fake hagiography of the character of the same name, who debuts as a charming man with feminine features, but after 30 years of debauchery and nomadic lifestyle, he sinks into a sickly sleep from which he wakes up a woman (and will live on as a woman for more than 300 years). In the novel, Orlando doesn’t find her end, but her immortality remains a thing of uncertainty – did she eventually pass away? Sexual fluidity and immortality are not explained by Woolf, they simply happen, as though it’s been like that since the beginning of time. The transition doesn’t make Orlando change her view of the world, although she begins to better understand what it means to be a woman in the Elizabethan era, around 1600 – from the corset mania, used as a device to hide pregnancy, to the obsession with marriage, giving birth to ​​male heirs and so on. Last but not least, Orlando is a novel with a great deal of absurdist humor (a detail that I try to emphasize here, in relation to Ottinger’s films), such as the game she plays at court with a sleazy archduke, whose advances she finds difficult to evade. Out of boredom, Orlando invents a new form of entertainment – watching the flies flying around the room and betting on which of the sugar cubes lined on the table they will land first. Hélas, this piece of absurdist humor can’t be found in Ottinger’s films – instead, irony and vulgarity are ever-present. Intertextual references to Orlando can be found all over Ottinger’s work.

In Madame X, Orlando is the name of the Chinese Orlando’s absolute ruler’s late girlfriend. After Orlando jumped into the water to swim and a deadly jellyfish ate her alive (apparently, Madame X lost her hand right then and there, ending up with a pitiful prosthetic), Madame X sold her soul to the sea gods, thus becoming oppressive and cold. In a false flashback, we see Orlando (played by Ottinger) reading Virginia Woolf’s novel. Then, the references to transition/immortality can be seen at the end of the film, when, after being murdered by Madame X, either by poisoning or torture, the protagonists come back to life in other forms, other costumes, and board the ship as if nothing had happened. In this sense, there is something of an ouroboros in Ottinger’s narrative, an endless cycle, a world that is never consumed. The issue of immortality also comes on in The Specimen, her 2002 short film that works as a pill: in a museum, the guide (a mime, whose words are “translated” on the screen, as in a silent film) prepares to show the tourists, also mimes, a quirk of nature. A burgeouis arrested by the police during the Bolshevik revolution suffers a head injury and ends up self-preserving in a cabinet after falling into a deep, lethargic sleep (if Virginia Woolf’s Orlando fell asleep for a period of days, the former woke up exactly 20 years later). According to the experts, he will wake up any moment now, but surprise, the cabinet is empty, so he must have gotten out all by himself, he must be found immediately, God forbid some bus runs him over!

Ottinger’s most Orlando-related film is Freak Orlando (1981) itself, which is also her most Campy film, no doubt; at first glance, Orlando (Magdalena Montezuma) is a genderless traveler, covered in a black cloak. After he enters the infamous Freak City, he stops to pay tribute (or is it the custom of the place?) to a woman tree (played by Delphine Seyrig), drinks her milk, and continues on his way. Inside, in a Berlin shopping mall, Orlando transforms into Orlando Cyclopa, a torturer at the shoes’ feast, who imprints mythological shoes with imaginary soles; she’s surrounded by nylon dwarfs who hand her the invisible tools, she’s an industrial Snow White. It seems, though, that she’s not doing a very good job, she gets several complaints from a handful of angry customers – their mythological soles are poorly executed! Not even Cyclopa’s employer, the same Seyrig, now with electrocuted hair, can save her from the shoppers’ rage; Cyclopa runs away with all the dwarfs, and the owner holds them off, not before the same customers chase her far outside their shopping area. Camp has never looked more outrageous, more frenetic than here. Orlando’s adventures do not stop here, not at all, this is just the beginning of a gallery of bizarre that Ottinger will introduce totally arbitrarily (or, as Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it, a freak salad): Siamese twin-sisters, dwarfs, deformed people, androgynous figures, mythological characters (Narcissus appears in a cameo looking at his own reflection in a puddle), saints with neon hearts and so on. Of all, my favorite: Orlando, overcome with anger, begins to grow a beard (as Madame X grows hair on her chest as she is betrayed by her servants), after a TV ad reminds of several episodes in human history in which heartbroken women have grown beards due to emotional shock. It all culminates with a pageant of ugliness, for the most outrageous humanoids – they all parade here in search of their soul mates. Here, too, Orlando switches gender, but the focus is less on the traveler, and more on the places he/she visits.

It’s unclear whether by introducing consumerist innuendos Ottinger lets slip some criticism against capitalism, but judging by the way she introduces modern technology into her films (in Dorian Gray, television is basically a lie factory, and its control tower resembles the podium of a mass destroyer), it’s clear that the German director would have preferred to live in Fellini’s films. You see, realism was not an option for Ottinger.

3 ) the escape. a one-way ticket, no return

Hence the alternative. In two of her films, Ottinger discusses the status of women. It might come too strong, but Madame X‘s call to women everywhere (“Chinese Orlando – stop – to all women – stop – we offer the world – full of gold – stop – love – stop – sea adventure – stop – call Chinese Orlando – call Chinese Orlando – stop”) shows the need for adventure that none of the protagonists had at home, but also the uncertainty, the dangers of the voyage, as stated by Patricia White in her study dedicated to the film. In fact, the women who leave their home are a housewife (who takes in her impromptu suitcase even the laundry conditioner), a glamorous diva, a psychologist, a bush pilot, an artist (played by Yvonne Rainer in a shirt, carrying, of course, a brush and colors, like any other artist would), a model named Blow-up and so on, all defined by the roles/jobs they performed in society. Once boarded on the ship, they come across the despotic leader Madame X, who only offers them a world without men (with one exception, the clown Belmondo, who is allowed on Chinese Orlando after being examined by the therapist and legitimated as a woman); otherwise, the gold is taken by Madame X only (Tabea Blumenschein, who communicates through a prosthetic hand, mostly frowns and spies on everyone), and the sea adventure is guaranteed by adopting the pirates’ lifestyle (because, invariably, these women will take over the role of gold-seeking bandits), which leads to stability. In Ottinger’s film, the roles have been reversed, now women are the pirates, and the only parrot on the ship is mute. Unlike the protagonist of Ticket of No Return (the same Blumenschein), who leaves her fictional hometown, La Rotonda, for a life of endless boozing in Berlin, these women leave for Chinese Orlando on a whim, simply based on some empty promises – even so, as life on the ship will show, it is better to be an oppressed female pirate (by another woman) than to carry on with your role in a patriarchal society. At least from this point of view, the fight over Madame X’s good graces is cause for gossip and games for most women on the ship, but it causes no harm whatsoever.

Ticket of No Return has been accused of not taking a critical approach to the issue of alcoholism, matter of fact, it seems to encourage the habit (just like blaming Madame X for being an aggressive feminist film) – the protagonist (according to the German title, she is simply a “drunk lady”, a title I’ll just have to reconcile with) is mainly surrounded by three meta characters (of Brechtian nature), “Common Sense”, “Social Question” and “Accurate Statistics”, who are in charge of commenting on the heroine’s drinking habits. They are not entirely to blame for breaking the fourth wall, but they do contribute significantly to painting the situations in an artificial shade – and the costumes, made by Blumenschein herself, are variations of thermal blankets, oversized hats, ripped windcheaters, so the drunken lady is always dressed up, never drinks water, sleeps in her clothes and becomes the horror of respectable behavior. The joke is all the more appetizing as in the prologue of the film she is presented as an allegorical being, with a long history in idealizing patriarchy (compared to Medea, Madonna, Beatrice, Iphigenia, Aspasia). Her companion is a homeless woman with whom she shares more than her passion for alcohol and clothes – outraging Berlin newspapers all over again. There’s a reason I said Ottinger is wickedly subversive, and that’s because these bombastic plot points and characters who refuse to conform to social norms are her very delicacies. I don’t know to what extent we can talk about allegory, but it is certain that the worlds created by Ottinger are essentially uncomfortable in terms of feminism, brimming with fluid sexuality (see the fictional city of Laura Molloy in Laocoon & Sons that doesn’t have any male residents, see the settlement of Mongolian women in Joan of Arc of Mongolia), and the only accepted form of love is homoerotic. Far from being models of conventional beauty (at least not one ever validated by the male gaze), these are the women we would have wanted on the big screen when male directors were busy with how to pan the camera over the female characters’ “goodies”.

Ulrike Ottinger’s films will be screened between 11-20 June, during One World Romania. The opening film is Paris Calligrammes (2019), Ottinger’s most recent documentary feature. Tickets are already available via Eventbook.

Georgiana Mușat

Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.