Ulrike Ottinger sees things the way nobody else does, and that isn't even her greatest gift. Her greatest gift is her ability to make the spectator see what she sees. It's not like like you, as a viewer, are seeing something you've never seen before, but rather that for the first time you're really paying attention, considering it in a way that you had never previously considered it. I remember watching Ottinger's Aller Jamais Retour for the first time about thirty-five years ago in a symposium on avant-garde feminist film. I can still hear Tabea Blumenschein's red heels clicking across the floor of the airport terminal, see her walking away from the camera instead of toward it, stopping to buy a one-way ticket to Berlin for a booze-fueled blitzkrieg through the city with the likes of Nina Hagen and a homeless woman she picks up along the way.
Still one of the greatest films, feminist or otherwise, that I have ever seen.
This is why I was so thrilled when I stumbled across a streamable version of Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia yesterday on Youtube. Ottinger's work is almost impossible to view and her DVDs equally impossible to find for purchase, so I was really looking forward to this film.
It didn't disappoint.
The story begins among a group of cosmopolitan Europeans on a trip along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The ensemble includes a couple of Russian military officers, female ethnologist Lady Windermere, played by Delphine Seyrig (in what turned out to be her final film role), an uptight German school teacher (Irm Hermann), a young female backpacker, and a Broadway musical star who calls herself Fanny Ziegfeld. There's also a rich young Jewish bon-vivant and Yiddish theater star who gets up to sing "Toot, Toot, Tootsie!" with a trio of female Russian chanteuses, the Kalinka Sisters. The whole thing evokes films like Sternberg's Shanghai Express, which is clearly its intention, but all of the characters, especially the women, are much more than a compendium of stereotypical clichés from movie history. Ottinger caresses these stereotypes, deconstructs them, and in doing so she reveals the complex human beings that reside beneath them.
The western narrative is hijacked - in every sense of the term - when a Mongolian bandit princess and her tribe stop the train and steal away with the female passengers for an extended trip into the exotic landscape of untamed Mongolia. Any notion of a traditional western storytelling is halted as we get lost in this new world, where dialogue gives way to the power of the image. Lady Windermere, both polymath and polyglot who is fluent in Mongolian, convinces the ladies to surrender to the beauty of this singular experience. Essentially, the Mongolians want nothing more than to share their culture with these fellow women, and this is where the full scope of Ottinger's genius is on display. What ensues is a sort of postmodern/feminist take on Montesquieu's Persian Letters in which the women come to realize that to understand themselves, they must understand the other. This is a world where money has no value other than decorative, where broken down motorcycles are pulled through the Taiga by camels, where shamans replace intellectuals and scholars, and where life is every bit as meaningful and rich as it is in the modern and technological world of late-stage capitalism.
It's impossible not to notice how different a story can be when told by female filmmaker intent on not simply repeating the narrative tropes of her male counterparts. The women taken off the train never feel as if they have been "abducted." They do not try to conquer the Mongolian tribe nor do they attempt to escape, which I am sure would be the trajectory of most films centered around a group captive males. The women see this as an opportunity for growth, for adventure, for compassion and understanding.
The film's ending achieves a sort of beautiful and cosmic equilibrium when another train is stopped by the Mongolian bandits so that the European women can return to their lives in the West. Only this time, there's a new passenger. When I watch the bandit princess, now decked out in haute couture on board the Trans-Siberian, seated in an elegant compartment next to Delphine Seyrig, I can't help but think of Lawrence of Arabia turned inside-out.
In any case, see it before it disappears, because it is a masterwork.
Still one of the greatest films, feminist or otherwise, that I have ever seen.
This is why I was so thrilled when I stumbled across a streamable version of Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia yesterday on Youtube. Ottinger's work is almost impossible to view and her DVDs equally impossible to find for purchase, so I was really looking forward to this film.
It didn't disappoint.
The story begins among a group of cosmopolitan Europeans on a trip along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The ensemble includes a couple of Russian military officers, female ethnologist Lady Windermere, played by Delphine Seyrig (in what turned out to be her final film role), an uptight German school teacher (Irm Hermann), a young female backpacker, and a Broadway musical star who calls herself Fanny Ziegfeld. There's also a rich young Jewish bon-vivant and Yiddish theater star who gets up to sing "Toot, Toot, Tootsie!" with a trio of female Russian chanteuses, the Kalinka Sisters. The whole thing evokes films like Sternberg's Shanghai Express, which is clearly its intention, but all of the characters, especially the women, are much more than a compendium of stereotypical clichés from movie history. Ottinger caresses these stereotypes, deconstructs them, and in doing so she reveals the complex human beings that reside beneath them.
The western narrative is hijacked - in every sense of the term - when a Mongolian bandit princess and her tribe stop the train and steal away with the female passengers for an extended trip into the exotic landscape of untamed Mongolia. Any notion of a traditional western storytelling is halted as we get lost in this new world, where dialogue gives way to the power of the image. Lady Windermere, both polymath and polyglot who is fluent in Mongolian, convinces the ladies to surrender to the beauty of this singular experience. Essentially, the Mongolians want nothing more than to share their culture with these fellow women, and this is where the full scope of Ottinger's genius is on display. What ensues is a sort of postmodern/feminist take on Montesquieu's Persian Letters in which the women come to realize that to understand themselves, they must understand the other. This is a world where money has no value other than decorative, where broken down motorcycles are pulled through the Taiga by camels, where shamans replace intellectuals and scholars, and where life is every bit as meaningful and rich as it is in the modern and technological world of late-stage capitalism.
It's impossible not to notice how different a story can be when told by female filmmaker intent on not simply repeating the narrative tropes of her male counterparts. The women taken off the train never feel as if they have been "abducted." They do not try to conquer the Mongolian tribe nor do they attempt to escape, which I am sure would be the trajectory of most films centered around a group captive males. The women see this as an opportunity for growth, for adventure, for compassion and understanding.
The film's ending achieves a sort of beautiful and cosmic equilibrium when another train is stopped by the Mongolian bandits so that the European women can return to their lives in the West. Only this time, there's a new passenger. When I watch the bandit princess, now decked out in haute couture on board the Trans-Siberian, seated in an elegant compartment next to Delphine Seyrig, I can't help but think of Lawrence of Arabia turned inside-out.
In any case, see it before it disappears, because it is a masterwork.