Ulrike Ottinger: the Autobiography of Art Cinema
2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjp007
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Communism, Protests, Social Movements
ResumoThe work of Ulrike Ottinger has, in the pages of Screen and many other scholarly books and journals, provoked a good deal of controversy as well as critical acclaim among film theorists. Ottinger has been making films – among them Madame X: eine absolute Herrscherin/Madame X: an Absolute Ruler (1978), Bildnis einer Trinkerin/Ticket of No Return (1979), Freak Orlando (1981), China: die Künste, der Alltag/China: the Arts, Everyday Life (1986), Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989), Südostpassage/Southeast Passage (2002) and Prater (2007) – at a prolific rate since the late 1970s, despite the funding difficulties that invariably accompany such an uncompromising vision and style. Her whole body of work (feature film, ethnographic documentary, photography, sculpture and video art installation) has in recent years in Germany and many other European countries, at last received the recognition it deserves, culminating in the screening of Southeast Passage at Documenta in Kassel in 2002 and in the highly successful retrospective of her work in Berlin in 2007. Nevertheless, in the UK film world there has been, in the last fifteen years, a relentless disparaging of the seriousness, tenacity and ‘high-mindedness’ with which a filmmaker like Ottinger pursues her erudite obsessions. For this reason, with the exception of an academic and arthouse audience, her later films have failed to find the acclaim in the UK that might otherwise be expected. Yet Ottinger's cinema has always held a key position in film theory, culminating in the great attention paid to her work in the 1980s and 1990s by feminist film scholars. Ottinger's work has helped to shape feminist film theory from its earliest days, in essays by Annette Kuhn, Miriam Hansen, Teresa De Lauretis, Kaja Silverman, Gertrud Koch, Janet Bergstrom, Sabine Hake, Brenda Longfellow, Mandy Merck and Patricia White. As Ottinger herself often remarks, her work gives rise to hostile reactions. In the early years this often came from feminists themselves, who found her attitude to sex and power too cruel or too coldly unsentimental, her defiant antirealism too intellectual, her provocative lesbian desires – fixed unrelentingly on the fashionable and beautiful bodies of some of her best-known actors (Tabea Blumenschein, Delphine Seyrig, the model Verushka) – too disconcertingly amorous, too bold, adventurous and unapologetic. While her work is now retrospectively credited with being at the forefront of queer cinema, this too has not been without controversy. Writing in Screen, Kristen Whissel has argued forcefully that the lesbian desires and fantasies enacted in films like Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia are predicated on an orientalist exoticization of other women, and that Ottinger uncritically replicates an eroticized imperialist gaze in the encounters with Mongolian people.1
Referência(s)