Directed by Ulrike Ottinger
Ulrike Ottinger might be New German Cinema’s greatest freak. Proudly renouncing the conventions of both popular and art cinema—including the work of her peers, the Werners among them—the films of the lesbian artist-turned-auteur traffic in the flagrant and flamboyant possibilities of a world beyond mannered constraints. They are lavish, lurid, and gloriously unburdened, prioritizing spectacle over anything as mundane as narrative. Here you’ll find four of Ottinger’s early provocations, populated with a veritable circus of deviants: sapphic swashbucklers and leather daddies; a boozing socialite and a campy Svengali.
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Ticket of No Return
Directed by Ulrike Ottiger | 108 mins | 1979
Ottinger’s collision of Hollywood flamboyancy and a particularly dour documentary aesthetic suits this Janus-faced tale of two female lushes from two very different walks of life, alike in many ways, but incapable of recognizing their bond. One is a kn... -
Madame X: An Absolute Ruler
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 131 mins | 1977
The hard, merciless pirate ruler of the China Sea, Madame X sends out a missive to women, inviting them to leave domestic security behind for a life of dangerous adventure, but when a panoply of different women—including Yvonne Rainer on rollerskates... -
Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 150 mins | 1984
In Ottinger’s contemporary reinvention of the famous morality tale, fin-de-siècle dandy Dorian Gray is reimagined as a drag role, played without comment on the switch by Veruschka von Lehndorff in the male lead. Ottinger collides Oscar Wilde with Frit... -
Freak Orlando
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 127 mins | 1981
An outrageous, carnivalesque camp reading of Virginia Woolf’s "Orlando", Ottinger’s crazed comedy follows its gender nonconforming hero/heroine through five wide-ranging adventures that span the history of the world: the Freak City department store, m...
