East Meets West: The Films of Ulrike Ottinger

March 8–June 28, 2020

In conjunction with the MATRIX exhibition of her photographs, Ulrike Ottinger returns to BAMPFA for a series of her films, which encompass ethnography, history, and fantasy. “Watching her films is like traveling through an undiscovered country of marvels” (Village Voice).

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Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia
Twelve Chairs
Chamisso's Shadow
Taiga
Prater

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Selected
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Films
Past
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Past Films

CANCELED: Countdown
- Sunday, June 28 1 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 1990
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
30th Anniversary Screening!

In this observational documentary filmed in Berlin and environs over the ten-day period leading up to the unification of the German currencies on July 1, 1990, Ottinger captures a city and a world on the brink of transition.
CANCELED: Freak Orlando
- Wednesday, June 24 7 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
West Germany, 1981
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
Digital Restoration

“Virginia Woolf meets the German camp underground in this extravaganza of performance art and oddity” (Jonathan Rosenbaum). Ottinger’s gender-bending, boundary-breaking fantasy of world history features Magdalena Montezuma, Delphine Seyrig, and Eddie Constantine.
CANCELED: Taiga, Parts 7–10
- Sunday, June 7 6 PM
- Sunday, June 14 12 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 1992
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Digital Restoration

As Ottinger’s epic Mongolian trek moves toward its conclusion, the narrative shifts from the wilderness to the towns of the Mongolian-Russian period, ending in the urban environs of Ulaanbaatar.
CANCELED: Taiga, Parts 1–6
- Sunday, June 7 12 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 1992
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
Digital Restoration

Ottinger’s serenely beautiful, eight-hour ethnographic project Taiga is a study in epic time, a journey through northern Mongolia structured in ten parts. This screening includes parts one through six. “Fascinating . . . a landmark in the West’s attempts to represent the East” (Cinemaya).
CANCELED: Prater
- Thursday, June 4 7 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, Austria, 2007
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Imported 35mm Print

Ottinger’s award-winning documentary on the Prater amusement park in Vienna draws a parallel between the illusionary business of carnival freak shows and the bygone era of a cinema of attractions.
CANCELED: Twelve Chairs
- Tuesday, April 7 6:30 PM
- Wednesday, May 20 7 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2004
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Digital Restoration

Ottinger’s glorious adaptation of a 1920s Ukrainian Soviet satire is both a picaresque post-revolutionary tale of avarice and a fascinating document of Ukraine circa 2004.
CANCELED: Under Snow
- Friday, April 24 4 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, Japan, 2011
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
Digital Restoration

In a film that is part documentary, part myth, Ottinger transports us to the Echigo region of northwestern Japan, where heavy snow blankets the landscape for more than half the year and distinctive ways of life have evolved.
CANCELED: Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters. Chapter 3: Kamchatka and Bering Island
- Saturday, April 4 1 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2016
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

Ottinger’s Bering Sea voyage concludes with Bering Island and the peninsula of Kamchatka, a land long held in tension between continuity and displacement, beauty and exploitation.
CANCELED: Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters. Chapter 2, Part 2: Chukotka and Wrangel Island
- Sunday, March 29 1 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2016
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

Continuing her exploration of Chukotka and points north, Ottinger documents varied facets of the region’s natural, cultural, and political history, and travels to the remote outpost of Wrangel Island, home to polar bears and a few hardy humans.
CANCELED: Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters. Chapter 2, Part 1: Chukotka
- Saturday, March 28 1 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2016
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

The second chapter in Ottinger’s voyage to the far north takes her to Chukotka in the Russian Far East, where Asia faces America across the narrow Bering Strait and a society of sea hunters still depend on their catch of fish, seals, and whales.
CANCELED: Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters. Chapter 1: Alaska and the Aleutian Islands
- Sunday, March 22 12 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2016
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

Ottinger traces the paths of past explorers in a multipart exploration of the peoples, landscapes, and legends of the Bering Sea. This extraordinarily beautiful work is perhaps Ottinger’s magnum opus.

Ulrike Ottinger in Person
CANCELED: Laocoon & Sons: The Story of the Transformation of Esmeralda del Rio
- Saturday, March 21 2:30 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
West Germany, 1972–73
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Digital Restoration

Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and featuring Tabea Blumenschein in multiple roles, Ottinger’s visually striking debut film is an allegory on themes of death, destruction, and resurrection. With short Superbia—The Pride.

Ulrike Ottinger in Person
CANCELED: Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia
- Thursday, March 19 7 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
West Germany, 1989
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
Digital Restoration

The epic adventure of seven Western women travelers on the Trans-Siberian Express who are ambushed by a band of Mongol horsewomen. “A rare and remarkable film. . . . Sumptuously stylized yet ardently observational” (New Yorker).

Ulrike Ottinger in Person
Exile Shanghai
- Sunday, March 8 1 PM
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 1997
Digital Restoration

Fascinating and rich with wry humor, Exile Shanghai is an extraordinary cultural odyssey that affectionately conjures up the lost Jewish world of 1930s Shanghai.

East Meets West: The Films of Ulrike Ottinger

March 8–June 28, 2020

Temporarily Closed
BAMPFA has made the difficult but necessary decision to close the museum until further notice. Our art galleries and cafe will be inaccessible during this period, and our film screenings, tours, and public programs have been temporarily discontinued.
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“Ottinger’s world can hardly be confused with humdrum reality. Watching her films is like traveling through an undiscovered country of marvels.” — Leslie Camhi, Village Voice

Berlin-based filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger returns as our guest in March for a series of her films complementing the MATRIX exhibition of her photographs. Whether narrative or...

“Ottinger’s world can hardly be confused with humdrum reality. Watching her films is like traveling through an undiscovered country of marvels.” — Leslie Camhi, Village Voice

Berlin-based filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger returns as our guest in March for a series of her films complementing the MATRIX exhibition of her photographs. Whether narrative or documentary, each of Ottinger’s films—for which she serves as both director and cinematographer—is a beautiful study of a specific place and time, a register of a historical moment. Exile Shanghai (1997) is as much a history lesson about the Jewish community living in Shanghai in the 1930s as it is a time capsule of the city before China’s sweeping economic transformations. Twelve Chairs, Ottinger’s 2004 adaptation of Odessan writers Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov’s satirical novel set in 1920s Soviet Ukraine, is equally a portrait of post-Soviet decline in the early twenty-first century. Her magnum opus, Chamisso’s Shadow (2016), integrates records of historical expeditions to the Bering Sea region with her own three-month journey to this remote part of the world that is nonetheless affected by the reach of geopolitical powers as far away as Moscow and Washington, DC. Her interest in cross-cultural contact and transformation has also taken her to Mongolia, where she filmed her narrative Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989) and returned to make her epic ethnographic documentary Taiga (1992). These themes also inform her subjects closer to home, such as her Berlin trilogy, including Freak Orlando (1981); her impressive study of the Viennese amusement park, Prater (2007); and the observational documentary Countdown (1990), about the reunification of East and West Berlin.

— Susan Oxtoby, Senior Film Curator

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Series organized by Senior Film Curator Susan Oxtoby. BAMPFA thanks Reinhild Feldhaus and Melanie Schwarke, Ulrike Ottinger Filmproduktion, Berlin; Carsten Zimmer, Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin; Rachel Rosen, SFFILM; Penny Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser, Berkeley; Deniz Göktürk, Department of German, Minoo Moallem, Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, and Natalia Brizuela, Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley, for their support of this series.