Four by Ulrike Ottinger

Ulrike Ottinger’s perspective on the world, whether real or constructed, has no equivalent or correlate. While she explored issues of postwar politics, identity, and society like many of her New German Cinema contemporaries (Werner Schroeter, R.W. Fassbinder), the feminist and lesbian elements of her films — most of which center women and involve repeat collaborations with Tabea Blumenschein or Delphine Seyrig — set her apart. Her time in the 1960s Parisian Pop art scene and her experience in theater manifest in a strong aesthetic sense of theatricality and play. With the aid of her highly constructed aesthetics, her fictional films traverse the absurd, but with a seriousness which comes from duration. Ottinger lingers within a scene (or rather, a set) for extended periods of time and invites us to abandon our own logic as well as a linear narrative logic to marvel at the sheer surrealism and camp that plays out before us. These extended moments of observation also occur in her documentary works, which often have runtimes upwards of three hours. Perhaps there is something about the way she approaches eccentricities in her fictional worlds that saves her ethnographic work like Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia and Taiga from veering into pure exoticism. Rather than an intrusion or possesion, there is a distancing that separates both filmmaker and audience from the scene or moment — whether it is a goat sacrifice ritual in Mongolia or the passionate performance of a fictional opera on the beach. It is in this distance and the always-present feeling of foreignness that we become transfixed with Ottinger's films.

Co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Chicago.