My friend Richard invited me to see Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989) Sunday evening, with Q&A afterward by Ottinger herself! The plot focuses on eclectic female passengers aboard a Trans-Mongolian rail, but it’s so strange that it first starts off as a hypothetical adventure, but then transforms into an actual cultural adventure for all parties involved (the film’s characters, the actors, and the audience as well). I’m sure you’d enjoy the smart character roles, how smartly it was made, and how humorous it is. The first half is filmed in Berlin at a studio (the visual solutions for this are quite amazing), and the second half is filmed as an adventure documentary / anthropological study in Mongolia – it was both a conceptual and cultural delight to watch.

And the languages! Mandarin, Russian, Mongolian, French, German, English. So involved and international.

The film leaves you with a lot of curiosity of how it was done and the experience of filming it, so it was pretty great to have Ottinger there to answer our questions. (I don’t know where else you can catch this film though..)

On Monday, I sat through a marathon run of her films. There’s a marked difference between Joan of Arc and the rest of her work from what I’ve seen. ‘The Korean Wedding Chest’ is a good neutral documentary, unless you’re Asian and you’ve seen the wedding banquet process enough times over; though the opening scenes of the temples were quite nice. Anthology threw in a bonus short film called Still Moving.. and that was honestly horrible and *really* hard to sit through. Not only did it go on forever with no new insight, it gave me a headache and then kicked me while I was down with 3 minutes of costumed machine gun firing.

Lastly, I saw ‘Ticket of No Return’ which is about lesbianeroticism (which was accompanied with gestured man-hating) and alcoholism. Some points were visually clever: when she took from ‘Suspiria’, and the Fellini inspired scene. Also to note, it seems that David Lynch was looking to Ottinger when making his films. Stylistically so, but also the imagery of a midget opening the curtains.. taken from signature Ottinger. But after the short, and then this.. I could only handle 40 minutes.

For More:

• Anthology’s Complete Schedule: http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/schedule/
• Ulrike Ottinger Official Website