Скачать или смотреть Ulrike Ottinger with Andrei Rus and Vanina Vignal - The Berlin Trilogy

A conversation about The Berlin Trilogy - (extracts)
https://festival-oneworld.ro/l/en/cat...

This film is part of ONE WORLD ROMANIA Human Rights IDFF 2021, June 11th–20th Bucharest.
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Born in Germany, Ulrike Ottinger moved to Paris when she was 20, where she joined the French artistic scene of the 1960s. Returned to West Germany in 1969, she takes part in the newly formed underground movement. Her first films, made in close collaboration with actress Tabea Blumenschein, are punk, feminist, queer, with surreal, naughty accents. Dating from this time, the festival selection proposes the director’s first two features, both works of fiction, "Madame X - An Absolute Ruler" (1978) and "Ticket of No Return" (1979).

Madame X, Ulrike Ottinger’s debut feature proposes one of the most hypnotic viewing experiences possible. Constructed in the form of an allegory, in which women from all around the world, of different ages and with various occupations, travel to a mythical place, a ship whereon a female authoritarian ruler with a generic name (Madame X) had created a community formed exclusively of women liberated from the constraints of patriarchal society, the film is representative for the director’s first experimental works. Mainly composed of choreographed scenes and carefully staged, extremely elaborate, and chromatically refined tableaux, "Madame X" is a radical feminist utopia, one with a minimal narrative, yet abundant in philosophical and cultural meanings. And it is of an intoxicating visual beauty, an aspect which is controlled by Ottinger as well (she is also the director of photography for her films), thus reminding one of the visual and expressive force of some American Underground films from the previous decade - works such as "Flaming Creatures" directed by Jack Smith, or "Chumlum" directed by Ron Rice -, but oftentimes outshining them in this regard.

As she advanced in her career, Ottinger constantly questioned the borders between fiction and documentary, directing a first travel documentary in mid 1980s (“China. The Arts - The People" from 1985), and subsequently returned only occasionally to fiction films - with actors and pre-written scripts -, yet every time combining fictional elements with other, purely documentary ones. Most of the films made by her in the last four decades are travel documentaries, wherein she captures not only people and their specific customs from all around the world, but, every time, she frames what she shoots in fairy tale covers, giving the stories she presents a mythical aura. The fact that the majority of her subjects come from places traditionally regarded as exotic by Western cultures - Japan ("Under Snow" 2011), the Siberian taiga ("Taiga" 1992), the frozen territories of Alaska, inhabited by the Eskimo descendants ("Chamisso’s Shadow" 2016), or China ("China. The Arts - The People" and "Exile Shanghai" 1997) - makes the viewing experience of these films similar to the ones from childhood, when we are initiated, through stories, into all kinds of remote rituals and beliefs.

Oftentimes, in her trips, Ulrike Ottinger tends to film women she listens to, whom she watches tenderly and observes during their daily activities. In this sense, her filmography works as an album of extremely complex and varied feminine/female figures. "Countdown" (1990) and "Southeast Passage" (2002), made in former European communist countries, are relevant in this regard. In the first of the two she observes the German society after the fall of communism, in the months prior to the West-East reunification, while the second one is a journey through several South-Eastern European countries, most of them formerly communist, and all of them parts of long gone empires, Ukraine, Turkey, Hungary, or Romania, the latter seen shortly before its adhesion to the European Union - which for a native viewer constitutes a fascinating trip back in time. Whether she films cultures which are similar to or radically different than her own, Ottinger regards them with fresh eyes and reveals them in spectacular light not through the unusual character of the themes she proposes, but through the profoundness of the meditation on them, by overlapping times, histories, and perspectives which render unsuspected meanings to them.