Happy 80th Birthday, Ulrike Ottinger!

6 June

Ulrike Ottinger is one of the outstanding avant-garde filmmakers and contemporary artists of her generation. Her multi-layered work includes not only fiction and documentary films but also paintings and collages, photographs, theatre and stage productions.

She grew up in Konstanz and moved to Paris aged 20, where she worked as a freelance photographer and painter and came in contact with film. Back in Germany, she and actor Tabea Blumenschein made their first film, Laokoon & Söhne (Laocoon & Sons, 1972-73), which she wrote, directed, produced, and for which she did the camera work – as she did in nearly all her productions. She developed the essential characteristics of her cinematic work during this period, including an expressive, surrealist directing style that largely forgoes a linear plot. Her female pirate parody Madame X – Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X – An Absolute Ruler, 1977), was both controversial and an international success, a milestone in queer film history. In the years that followed, Ulrike Ottinger produced her Berlin trilogy, Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return, 1979), Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, 1984).

Ulrike Ottinger turned to documentary films with her four-and-a-half-hour documentary China. Die Künste – der Alltag (China. The Arts – the People, 1985). Her documentary work is characterised by extremely long narrative forms, which she precedes with intensive and extensive research, and her fascination with foreign cultures and the stylistic idioms of the Far East. She largely avoids commentary, to allow the images and sound to make their own impressions and to avoid "exoticising" other cultures. Ulrike Ottinger accompanied northern Mongolian nomads on their wanderings for the eight-and-a-half-hour production Taiga (1991–92); Exil Shanghai (Exile Shanghai, 1997) depicts that city as a place of refuge for Jews fleeing Europe during the Nazi era; the six-hour travel essay Südostpassage (Southeast Passage, 2002) investigates countries in south-easternmost Europe; Unter Schnee (Under Snow, 2011) explores everyday life in the Japanese province of Echigo, which frequently has metre-high snow well into May. In 2012, she herself and her work were the focus of a documentary, Ulrike Ottinger – Die Nomadin vom See ("The Nomad from the Lake"), by Brigitte Kramer. Following a months-long journey along the Bering Sea in the footsteps of the great 18th- and 19th-century explorers, Ottinger created Chamissos Schatten (Chamisso's Shadow, 2016), her longest documentary to date, at twelve hours.

Ulrike Ottinger's films have won many awards including the German Film Award, the Berlinale Camera and the German Film Critics' Prize. Her works have been honoured in numerous retrospectives and solo exhibitions in well-known institutions such as MoMA in New York, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Centre Pompidou. She was invited to exhibit her photographic and cinematic works at major art exhibitions like the Biennale di Venezia, Documenta and the Berlin Biennale.

Like many of her films, her most recent one premiered at the Berlinale: Paris Calligrammes (2018–20) weaves Ulrike Ottinger's personal reminiscences of Paris during the social, political and cultural unrest of the 1960s into a cinematic calligram.

Under Snow (Unter Schnee). 2011

It is deep winter in the Japanese province of Echigo. The snowy landscape might look like the backdrop to a fairytale, but life in the white cold is arduous for the inhabitants of the region. Ulrike Ottinger observes contemporary life there and simultaneously sends off two actors on a journey to explore the region’s past. UNDER SNOW is a realistic documentary about a rural area and also an investigation of its myths.