Defiantly unconventional, extravagantly stylized, and gleefully transgressive, the sprawling cinematic pageants of Ulrike Ottinger swirl avant-garde provocation, inquisitive ethnography, punk surrealism, and baroque theatricality into some of the most wondrously unclassifiable spectacles of the New German Cinema. Whether seeing Cold War Germany’s divided capital through radically imaginative eyes in her early Berlin Trilogy or exploring the Mongolian steppes and the Bering Sea in her more recent documentaries, Ottinger blends fantasy and observation in her stunning, painterly images. Lesbian pirates (MADAAME X: AN ABSOLUTE RULER), Dorian Gray in drag (DORIAN GRAY IN THE MIRROR OF THE YELLOW PRESS), self-flagellating leather daddies (FREAK ORLANDO), and an ennui-stricken socialite drinking herself into oblivion (TICKET OF NO RETURN) are just some of the outré (and always outrageously costumed) oddballs populating the Ottinger canon, which audaciously reimagines what cinema can be and for whose gaze it is made.
This interview with director Ulrike Ottinger was recorded in 2022.
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger and Tabea Blumenschein • 1975 • West Germany
Starring Tabea Blumenschein, Ulrike Ottinger
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” Ulrike Ottinger’s first film unfolds in a fantastical world inhabited only by women, where the extraordinary Esmeralda del Rio (the direct...
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 1977 • West Germany
Starring Tabea Blumenschein, Roswitha Janz, Monika von Cube
Ulrike Ottinger’s singular debut feature is an extravagantly stylized lesbian pirate spectacle that radically deconstructs decades of male-oriented adventures. Madame X (Tabea Blumensche...
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 1979 • West Germany
Starring Tabea Blumenschein, Lutze, Magdalena Montezuma
The outré imagination of German New Wave visionary Ulrike Ottinger is on dazzling display in this alcohol-soaked tour through the Berlin underworld. A rich, unnamed, enigmatic woman (Ottinge...
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 1981 • West Germany
Starring Magdalena Montezuma, Delphine Seyrig, Albert Heins
Ulrike Ottinger transforms Virginia Woolf’s queer feminist classic ORLANDO into an outrageous camp spectacle in which a gender-fluid time traveler (Magdalena Montezuma) zigzags across hi...
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 1984 • West Germany
Starring Veruschka von Lehndorff, Delphine Seyrig, Tabea Blumenschein
The final installment in Ulrike Ottinger’s Berlin Trilogy (following TICKET OF NO RETURN and FREAK ORLANDO) casts Delphine Seyrig as the nefarious Fritz Lang supervillain Dr. M...
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 1989 • West Germany, France
Starring Badema, Lydia Billiet, Christoph Eichhorn
Ulrike Ottinger reinvents the adventure film with her singular queer feminist sensibility and eye for camp spectacle. While traveling aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, a coterie of inter...
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 1992 • Germany
This meditative documentary is Ulrike Ottinger’s monumental account of the extensive time she spent in Mongolia, patiently capturing the rituals and rhythms of everyday life among the nomadic people of the country’s North. Breathtaking landscapes and ...
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 2007 • Germany, Austria
Starring Veruschka von Lehndorff, Robert Kaldy-Karo
Vienna’s Prater is an amusement park and a desire machine. No mechanical invention, novel idea, or sensational innovation could escape incorporation into the Prater. The breathtaking, often ...
“Alaska and the Aleutian Islands”
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 2016 • Germany
Starring Hanns Zischler, Burghart Klaussner, Thomas Thieme
Unfolding across three chapters and twelve hours, this ethnographic epic documents director Ulrike Ottinger’s journey along the Bering Sea, through Alaska, th...
“Chukotka”
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 2016 • Germany
Starring Hanns Zischler, Burghart Klaussner, Thomas Thieme
Unfolding across three chapters and twelve hours, this ethnographic epic documents director Ulrike Ottinger’s journey along the Bering Sea, through Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and...
“Chukotka and Wrangel Island”
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 2016 • Germany
Starring Hanns Zischler, Burghart Klaussner, Thomas Thieme
Unfolding across three chapters and twelve hours, this ethnographic epic documents director Ulrike Ottinger’s journey along the Bering Sea, through Alaska, the Al...
“Kamtchatka and Bering Island”
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 2016 • Germany
Starring Hanns Zischler, Burghart Klaussner, Thomas Thieme
Unfolding across three chapters and twelve hours, this ethnographic epic documents director Ulrike Ottinger’s journey along the Bering Sea, through Alaska, the A...
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 2020 • France, Germany
The latest from New German Cinema visionary Ulrike Ottinger may be her most personal work yet: a journey through memory back to the Paris of the 1960s, where she spent formative years as a painter early in her artistic career. Her vivid anecdo...
