Ulrike Ottinger

Since 1974, German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has created a substantial body of films that explore a world of difference defined by the tension and transfer between settled and nomadic ways of life. In many of her films, including Exile Shanghai, an experimental documentary about the Jews of Shanghai, and Joan of Arc of Mongolia, in which passengers on the Trans-Siberian Express are abducted by Mongolian bandits, she also probes the encounter with the other, whether exotic or simply unpredictable. In Ulrike Ottinger Laurence A. Rickels offers a series of sensitive and original analyses of Ottinger’s films, as well as her more recent photographic artworks, situated within a dazzling thought experiment centered on the history of art cinema through the turn of the twenty-first century. In addition to commemorating the death of a once-vital art form, this book also affirms Ottinger’s defiantly optimistic turn toward the documentary film as a means of mediating present clashes between tradition and modernity, between the local and the global. Widely regarded as a singular and provocative talent, Ottinger’s conspicuous absence from critical discourse is, for Rickels, symptomatic of the art cinema’s demise. Incorporating interviews he conducted with Ottinger and illustrated with stunning examples from her photographic oeuvre, this book takes up the challenges posed by Ottinger’s filmography to interrogate, ultimately, the very practice-and possibility-of art cinema today. Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of several books, including The Case of California, The Vampire Lectures, and the three-volume Nazi Psychoanalysis (all published by Minnesota). He is a recognized art writer whose reflections on contemporary visual art appear regularly in numerous exhibition catalogues as well as in Artforum, artUS, and Flash Art.

The first English-language scholarly collection of articles on the German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger. This book collects international scholarship on the Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger. These articles engage with the full range of her works, from the early Berlin feature films of the 1970s and 1980s to the ethnographic documentaries and art exhibitions, photography shows, installations, and artist books. The collection brings together feminist film theorists with art historians and cultural theorists, each with a distinctive and detailed perspective on the queer fabulist genres of Ottinger, now in her eighties.

This volume offers an overview of German artist Ulrike Ottinger (born 1942), whose films explore the tensions between documentary and fiction. It includes reproductions of installations, such as Floating Flood (2011), an audio-visual collage of the artist's travels, drawing from four decades of cinematic creativity.

"She, a woman of high beauty, created like no other to be Medea, Madonna, Iphigenia, Aspasia, decided one sunny winter day to escape her loneliness and to leave La Rotonda. She bought a ticket 'Aller jamais retour. Berlin Tegel'." This is the opening scene of Ulrike Ottinger's momentous 1979 film Ticket of No Return -the woman of high beauty was Tabea Blumenschein. Unconcerned by all conventions, Blumenschein adored transformation: in a distinctive, avant-garde aesthetic, the two women embraced various different identities and challenged many norms, in the process revealing the performativity of gender. Initiating a dialog between the two artists' perspectives, these books bring together for the first time Blumenschein's drawings with Ottinger's photographs from their joint performance sessions. ULRIKE OTTINGER (*1942, Constance) is one of the most import- ant German filmmakers. Moving to Berlin in 1973, she became a pioneer of avant-garde cinematography. Ottinger's photographic works, feature films and documentaries have been shown at major international festivals and retrospectives, including the MoMa in New York, Berlinale, the documenta and the Venice Biennale. TABEA BLUMENSCHEIN (1952-2020) was a cult figure of West Berlin's queer feminist subculture in the 1970s and 80s. For about ten years, she played a key role in Ottinger's films as leading actress and costume designer, and was part of legendary avant- garde punk collective Die tödliche Doris. In the 1990s she withdrew from the public, yet remained active as an artist until her death.

This broad-ranging collection, the first of its kind, gathers essays on the representation of women in recent German cinema, as well as recent interviews with German women filmmakers.

With hair slicked back and shirt collar framing her young patrician face, Katherine Hepburn's image in the 1935 film Sylvia Scarlett was seen by many as a lesbian representation. Yet, Amy Villarejo argues, there is no final ground upon which to explain why that image of Hepburn signifies lesbian or why such a cross-dressing Hollywood fantasy edges into collective consciousness as a lesbian narrative. Investigating what allows viewers to perceive an image or narrative as "lesbian," Villarejo presents a theoretical exploration of lesbian visibility. Focusing on images of lesbians in film, she analyzes what these representations contain and their limits. She combines Marxist theories of value with poststructuralist insights to argue that lesbian visibility operates simultaneously as an achievement and a ruse, a possibility for building a new visual politics and away of rendering static and contained what lesbian might mean. Integrating cinema studies, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies, Villarejo illuminates the contexts within which the lesbian is rendered visible. Toward that end, she analyzes key portrayals of lesbians in public culture, particularly in documentary film. She considers a range of films—from documentaries about Cuba and lesbian pulp fiction to Exile Shanghai and The Brandon Teena Story—and, in doing so, brings to light a nuanced economy of value and desire.

"Journée d'un G.I." features paintings and serigraphs from the 1960s. Ulrike Ottinger's often multi-part works, or works divided into several pictorial fields, reveal a passion for storytelling that ultimately finds its fulfillment in the medium of film. She became somewhat of a cult star in cineaste circles with her Berlin trilogy and its outstanding second film "Freak Orlando" (1981). In 2019, in the diary "Paris Calligrammes", she went on to show memories of her formative decade in Paris in a cinematic collection, which brings us right to the heart of the pictorial narratives of "Journée d'un G.I." It's the mid-1960s, Ulrike Ottinger is a painter, when Paris is shaken by images of war and revolution. At home in Nouvelle Figuration, a Parisian form of Pop Art, it is everyday scenes, comics, photography and advertising that determine the narrative style of Ottinger's images. Day-to-day rituals mingle with references to historical figures and literary heroes. While the daily battles rage, her heroes are taking a break; Che Guevara as "Le penseur" is lolling on a sofa while sipping a drink; Allen Ginsberg has "No more to say and nothing to weep for."

Ulrike Ottinger belongs to those pioneers of art cinema who recognised the possibilities of film as a continuation of their work early on. Her output goes far beyond that of a film-maker, however: she is an artist, photographer, author and director.She has been making film history since the 1970s, and her works have been shown at the most important international festivals and have won numerous prizes. Her artistic work caused a sensation at the Biennale di Venezia (1980), documenta 11 (2002) and the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004).This catalogue accompanies the exhibition at kestnergesellschaft in Hannover. The various aspects of her œuvre – film, opera and theatre directing, stage design, photography and ritual objects inspired by her travels – all flow into a large-scale installation extending through several spaces.For the first time this catalogue comprehensively documents Ulrike Ottinger's exhibitions from the 1960s up to the present.English and German text.

There were virtually no women film directors in germany until the 1970s. today there are proportionally more than in any other film-making country6, and their work has been extremely influential. Directors like Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Ulrike Ottinger and Helke Sander have made a huge contribution to feminist film culture, but until now critical consideration of New German Cinema in Britain and the United States has focused almost exclusively on male directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. In Women and the New German Cinema Julia Knight examines how restrictive social, economic and institutional conditions have compounded the neglect of the new women directors. Rejecting the traditional auteur approach, she explores the principal characteristics of women’s film-making in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular the role of the women’s movement, the concern with the notion of a ‘feminine aesthetic’, women’s entry into the mainstream, and the emergence of a so-called post-feminist cinema. This timely and comprehensive study will be essential reading for everyone concerned with contemporary cinema and feminism.