Movies: Ulrike Ottinger

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each...

A sartorially resplendent woman of few words arrives in Berlin with plans to live out the rest of her days as a drunkard....

FREAK ORLANDO is divided into five more-or-less distinct sections, all featuring "Freak" Orlando, a woman, played by the late Magdalena Montezuma, who appears in various guises, and deformities, throughout....

Vienna’s Prater is an amusement park and a desire machine. No mechanical invention, no novel idea or sensational innovation could escape incorporation into the Prater. The diverse story-telling in Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater” transforms this place...

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. Mabuse, here the head of a powerful media empire that seeks to create headl...

The Darkhad and Soyon Uriyanghai peoples live in a vast valley in Northern Mongolia, much as their ancestors have for centuries. "Taiga" is the record of a long period spent by the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger among these people....

Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chan...

...Her son-in-law, Ippolit Matwejewitch Worobjaninow, is a former nobleman and a dandy who is currently wasting away as a small town magistrate in charge of civil marriages. He eagerly takes up the quest to find the treasure. Meanwhile, over the year...

A group of cosmopolitan women passengers aboard the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian Railway are taken prisoner by Ulan Iga, a warrior princess....

Once upon a time there was a country known by the name of Laura Molloy. Laura Molloy was the name of this country. Only women lived in Laura MolloyEsmeralda del Rio was a woman. One day Esmeralda del Rio had the idea to undergo a series of transforma...

Ulrike Ottinger weaves her personal memories of Parisian bohemianism and the serious social, political and cultural upheavals of the time into a cinematic “figure poem.”...

In fall 2007 the Women's Film Festival Seoul issued a call that did not promise, like the pirate queen Madame X, "gold, love, and adventure," but something as tempting as the opportunity to film a 15-minute short in Korea, which, assembled as one of ...

In Echigo in Japan the snow often lies several feet deep well into May covering landscape and villages. Over the centuries the inhabitants have organised their lives accordingly. In order to record their very distinctive forms of everyday life, their...

Right at the heart of the debates on the discrimination of women in the film industry, this documentary raises questions, while offering a voice to women and their cinema. Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Mira Nair, Margarethe Von Trotta, Ulrike Ott...

Barbara Hammer’s Audience is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in ...

Reel 11 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series....

The notorious pirate ruler Madame X places a print ad, calling on women to escape their boring lives and promising "gold, love and adventure" to all who come aboard her ship, the Orlando. A motley crew including a housewife, diva and artist (played b...

The Blood Countess and her maid take us on a wild hunt for blood and secrets from times gone by. On their adventurous journey, they desperately search for the precious lifeblood while also uncovering the dark history of their ancestors. But suddenly ...

A narrative about "the days when the Jews found rest from their enemies and the month that was transformed from pain to joy, from mourning to a feast day." A parable about the courage to arrive in another country and a funny mound of joy about luck i...

When, before the revolution, accidentally arrested, the philistine - a tsarist civil servant of high status - falls in deep, lethargic sleep. 20 years later he wakes up and finds himself in a post-revolutionary, still young Soviet Union. He is stunne...