The screening will take place the 20th of February at Bubblan, Fiskhamnsgatan 41B Kajskjul 46, Göteborg. Here you can find the Facebook event: Ticket of No Return
The screening will start at 7 pm and the venue will open at 5.30 pm. We will serve some food for reasonable price and play film music to get us In The mood For Cinema (pun intended).
The number of seats is limited so be sure to book by sending an email to: kuf.kontakt@gmail.com; Entrance fee is 60 SEK.
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One of the thrills about the creative process of film curation is the possibility of discovering intersections and putting together programs that reflect how films, authors, aesthetics, politics and more can rendezvous with each other in the most fascinating ways.
As I delved deeper into the work of Ulrike Ottinger I was pleased to discover, not only the idiosyncratic qualities and the uniqueness of her oeuvre, but also how much her career, interests and style resemble other authors that are very dear to this film club. Unfortunately, and tragically, one of these similarities is the way women filmmakers’ contributions to film history have often been put aside in favour of their male peers.
Ulrike Ottinger is perhaps the major female filmmaker of the New German Cinema (NGC). Alongside directors such as Fassbinder and Herzog, she contributed greatly to the innovation of cinematic language. At the same time her position was both in tune as well as at odds with the NGC. Even though she for instance shared with Fassbinder the queerness and the stylishness, she engaged more directly with a contradictory, disjoint, playful and avant-gardist mode a filming. As Michael Sicinski cleverly observe in this article she wasn’t interested in the NGC’s “interrogation of the authoritarian legacy of the Third Reich”, or with the Fassbinderian reconfiguration of the classical Hollywood melodrama. Rather, Ottinger used her visual arts background and Francophone influences to create something quite unique and experimental; anarchic and surrealist; disinterested in naturalistic mode of presentation and linear narratives.
Ottinger started out as a painter in Paris, she is a photographer, worked as a performer and as a theatre director and even though the amazing costumes in Ticket of No Return are the work of Tabea Blumenschein, (the main protagonist), costume design was something with which she also engaged. Basically, Ottinger is usually involved in most of the film-making process: a truly auteuristic proposition. This artistic background and interest in the plastic arts reminds me of Varda and her position in the French New Wave. Although differences are well pronounced, Varda also had a distinctively photographic approach to film she herself called Cinécriture and that involves a holistic way of conceiving the production of a film where instead of a pen for writing a story, the camera and cinematic eye becomes the centre. And although more clearly part of a group within the French New Wave, namely the so-called Left Bank Cinema (Rive Gauche), she also occupied a liminal position within the movement. Similarly to Ottinger and her work within NGC, Varda also made several impressive pieces during these first years, and as she kept producing major works, she also explored documentary and short films, expanding, as Ottinger did, the range of her experimental curiosity. Other contemporary women directors that occupy similar positions in terms of creativity and experimentality, beyond ordinary modes of film producation, are for instance, Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Raider, Vera Chitilova, Laura Mulvey and Mai Zetterling. This is not the place where one can spend the due time in order to better develop these deep and fruitful assonances, but I believe is however important to place Ottinger’s work in the international context of women’s counter-cinema.
Compared to her peers, Ottinger work has a more distinctly surrealist edge, and because of the Dadaist influences in the art, and because of the inspiration from the work of Genet and Atonin Artaud in theatre, she became concerned with “disruption, iconology, and a form of prelinguistic primitivism that could short-circuit narrative meaning, if not language itself”. This is evident from watching Ticket of No Return, a film where the main protagonist never utters a word, walks around Berlin getting drunk in fabulous clothes, have strange encounters and is followed by a very special trio of women who clearly resemble a Greek chorus of old. I obviously cannot lay claim to any sort of interpretation or meaning but I am stunned by the vision and the power of the images. Clearly, there are some deep layers that can often be found in such an accomplished avant-garde masterpiece, as Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the film. I responded in particular to the recurrent images of mirror surfaces, often covered by water or alcohol, alongside the many empty glasses constantly thrown around and shattered.
It is a voyage of no return in the landscape of the mind through the rough streets of Berlin, where the absence of language and the search for the inner narcissistic other coalesce into a self-destructive and nihilistic “drink yourself to death” endeavour that seeks to kill the mirror image: a psychoanalytic avant-gardist trip on steroids where possible interpretations abound and collapse. I invite you to watch the film on a visceral and experiential level, it will hopefully stay with you for a while as it did for me.
I am very pleased to have made this encounter with such an exciting director thanks to the curation work of the No Home Movies film club. Ottinger’s latest film, Paris Calligrammes premiered in 2020 at the Berlinale where she was awarded with the prestigious Berlinale Camera. After the very productive 80s Ottinger will turn, among other things, to ethnographic documentaries’ modes of presentation, but even there she would explode these troughs her surrealistic lens and question the assumptions of Western-centred ways of looking and explore Otherness.
As you might have guessed by this brief comment on Ticket of No Return, it is almost impossible to pin down this picture, nor should one try, and since I have been reading some very interesting texts about it, I want to share this with you and abstain from making the newsletter into a sort of analytical dissertation, which I neither want to do nor I am capable of doing.
Finally, Ticket of No Return can also be regarded as example of how much can be accomplished with very limited means. As Richard Linklater said, a fan of Ottinger, the film is also an inspiration for indie filmmakers showing what you can achieve with some great ideas, a few collaborators and certain sense for design.
See you at Bubblan on Sunday!
Ulrike Ottinger’s Strange Subversions
ULRIKE OTTINGER IN SIX CONTRADICTION
Open Ticket: The Long, Strange Trip of Ulrike Ottinger
Ulrike Ottinger : the autobiography of art cinema
Richard Linklater Presents: TICKET OF NO RETURN