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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Fascinating and rich with wry humor, Exile Shanghai is an extraordinary cultural odyssey that affectionately conjures up the lost Jewish world of 1930s Shanghai.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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.
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.