The director Ulrike Ottinger is one of those filmmakers whose work is closely linked to the Berlinale. Around a dozen of her avant-garde films were screened at the festival, and in 2020 she was honored with the Berlinale Camera. The archivists at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin were all the more delighted when they found out that the Konstanz native was gradually handing over the numerous remains of her cinematic work to them: screenplays, props, films and stills, flyers and press articles and, of course, the unusual costumes. Because the smart hat that Ottinger put on in 1980 during the shooting of “Freak Orlando” looks really well-behaved in contrast to what appears in the film itself: occult habit wearers, for example, who wear chains and huge locks around their necks, or an ans Crossed bearded woman in a ball gown, who belts out her suffering in arias to the world. All loosely adapted from Virginia Woolf’s landmark novel Orlando, which questioned gender identities when the word queer was still a dirty word. The objects from Ottinger’s parallel life as an artist, stage designer and curator will be left to Ottinger at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, of which the 80-year-old has been a member since 1997. The photographs in the Ulrike Ottinger Archive are to be made accessible first.
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