East Meets West: The Films of Ulrike Ottinger

November 20, 2020–March 14, 2021

In conjunction with a MATRIX exhibition of her photographs, German artist Ulrike Ottinger joins us online to discuss and share her cinematic work, which encompasses 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
Paris Calligrammes
Chamisso's Shadow
Taiga

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Available Films

Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2016
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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Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters. Chapter 1: Alaska and the Aleutian Islands
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2016
Ottinger voyages to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands in Part 1 of her epic documentary tracing the paths of past explorers through the Bering Sea region.
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Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters. Chapter 2, Part 1: Chukotka
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2016
The second chapter in Ottinger’s Arctic exploration takes her to Chukotka in the Russian Far East.
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Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters. Chapter 2, Part 2: Chukotka and Wrangel Island
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2016
Ottinger travels from Chukotka to the remote outpost of Wrangel Island as her journey continues.
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Chamisso’s Shadow: A Journey to the Bering Sea in Three Chapters. Chapter 3: Kamchatka and Bering Island
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2016
Ottinger’s Bering Sea voyage concludes with the peninsula of Kamchatka and Bering Island.
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Exile Shanghai
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.
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Freak Orlando
Ulrike Ottinger
West Germany, 1981
Digital Restoration
Available January 18

“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.
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Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia
Ulrike Ottinger
West Germany, 1989
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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Laocoon & Sons: The Story of the Transformation of Esmeralda del Rio
Ulrike Ottinger
West Germany, 1972–73
Digital Restoration
Available December 1

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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Paris Calligrammes
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, France, 2020
Ottinger’s latest film describes her experiences as a young artist living in Paris in the 1960s, evoking a place and time of intellectual, artistic, and political ferment.
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Prater
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, Austria, 2007
Available January 18

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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Taiga
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 1992
Digital Restoration
Available January 18

Ottinger’s serenely beautiful, eight-hour ethnographic project Taiga is a study in epic time, a journey through northern Mongolia structured in ten parts. “Fascinating . . . a landmark in the West’s attempts to represent the East” (Cinemaya).
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The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press
Ulrike Ottinger
West Germany, 1984
Available January 18

Delphine Seyrig plays Dr. Mabuse, the unscrupulous president of a multinational press conglomerate scheming up a new plan for world domination, in Ottinger’s Langian exploration of media manipulation.
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Ticket of No Return
Ulrike Ottinger
West Germany, 1979
Available January 18

A dive into Berlin’s seedy underside, courtesy of two women drinking themselves into oblivion. With appearances by Magdalena Montezuma, Nina Hagen, Eddie Constantine, and other cult stars.
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Twelve Chairs
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 2004
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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Ulrike Ottinger: Nomad from the Lake
Brigitte Kramer
Germany, 2012
This personal portrait of the idiosyncratic German artist, filmmaker, and feminist traces her artistic development and offers insights into her singular body of work.
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Under Snow
Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, Japan, 2011
Digital Restoration
Available January 18

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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East Meets West: The Films of Ulrike Ottinger

November 20, 2020–March 14, 2021

“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 was to be our guest in spring 2020 for a series of her films complementing a MATRIX exhibition of her photographs. Then COVID-19 arrived. As we work toward reopening the BAMPFA galleries this winter, we are delighted to share Ottinger’s films on BAMPFA’s streaming platform, accompanied by interviews with the artist. Together, these screenings and conversations offer a chance to get at the heart of an extraordinary body of work made over the last four decades.

Whether narrative or documentary, each of Ottinger’s films—for which she...

“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

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—Ticket of No Return (1979), Freak Orlando (1981), and The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press (1984)—and her impressive study of the Viennese amusement park, Prater (2007). Ottinger’s latest film, Paris Calligrammes (2020), is a thoughtful look back to the Paris of the 1960s, where she lived for a decade as a young artist and absorbed a wide range of intellectual and artistic influences and ideas.

This series unfolds in two parts, with seven films opening in late 2020 and additional titles becoming available in January 2021. At the time of publication, online interviews with Ulrike Ottinger were being scheduled; check back for details.

—Susan Oxtoby, Director of Film and Senior Film Curator

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Thanks

Series organized by Senior Film Curator Susan Oxtoby. BAMPFA thanks Reinhild Feldhaus, Melanie Schwarke, and Rejane Salzmann, Ulrike Ottinger Filmproduktion, Berlin; Carsten Zimmer, Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin; 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.