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| Ticket of No Return (Ulrike Ottinger, 1979) | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 5 2015, 01:25 PM (669 Views) | |
| jiricine_nvkino | Aug 5 2015, 01:25 PM Post #1 |
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| jiricine_nvkino | Aug 5 2015, 01:26 PM Post #2 |
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xoxoxoxox
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http://www.ulrikeottinger.com/index.php/783.html She purchased a ticket of no return to Berlin-Tegel. She wanted to forget her past, or rather to abandon it like a condemned house. She wanted to concentrate all her energies on one thing, something all her own. To follow her own destiny at last was her only desire. Berlin, a city in which she was a complete stranger, seemed just the place to indulge her passion undisturbed. Her passion was alcohol, she lived to drink and drank to live, the life of a drunkard. Her resolve to live out a narcissistic, pessimistic cult of solitude strengthened during her flight until it reached the level at which it could be lived. The time was ripe to put her plans into action. The movement of transformation in this film has the opposite trajectory as the previous film Madame X. There women come from very specific backgrounds to journey into the unknown, here a woman without a name comes from an unknown place and engages in a most specific sight-seeing tour of Berlin based on her interest in alcoholic beverages. In a sense this project also represents the exploration of the unknown, and death and destruction await her equally at the end of each journey, that to the extreme outer regions of adventure as well as that of total narcissistic retreat into the self. Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Aug 5 2015, 01:30 PM.
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| jiricine_nvkino | Aug 5 2015, 01:29 PM Post #3 |
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http://www.filmref.com/notes/archives/2006/05/ticket_of_no_return_1979.html Invoking Rainer Werner Fassbinder's irreverent, artful kitsch, Federico Fellini's carnivalesque grotesquerie, and Werner Schroeter's impenetrable, autobiographical self-evidence, Ticket of No Return encapsulates the highly stylized, funny, frustrating, offbeat, decadent, intoxicating, and fevered delirium that is Ulrike Ottinger's cinema. A chronicle of an archetypally beautiful, impeccably dressed woman "of antique grace and raphaelic harmony" eponymously called 'She' (Tabea Blumenschein) who, as the film begins, decides to withdraw from her privileged life in La Rotunda and books a one-way ticket to Berlin-Tegel in order to follow her one true desire - to embark on a sightseeing drinking binge through the city - the film subverts the iconic images of Hollywood glamour queens and skid row drunkards with a parodic and egalitarian view of substance abuse through the perspective of an unapologetic, jet-setting, merry-making alcoholic and, in the process, confronts the hypocrisy of cultural attitudes towards the social consumption of alcohol. Occasionally crossing paths with a trio of uptight and judgmental, yet passive and unobtrusive public service matrons appropriately named Social Question (played by Schroeter's muse, Magdalena Montezuma), Accurate Statistics (Orpha Termin), and Common Sense (Monika von Cube) who provide a peripheral, Greek chorus-like commentary on the demographic research, anecdotal information, and physical and societal repercussions of alcohol abuse, the heroine defies all their impotent attempts at instilling the virtues of moderation and rehabilitation, and instead befriends a bag lady (Lutze) and subsequently molds her into her own image as a fashionable drunk, complete with haute couture clothing and a penchant for getting plastered on cognac and fine vintage wine. Wandering through the off-the-beaten-path streets of Berlin at dusk on a series of increasingly bizarre, surreal, and dissociative alcohol-infused, somnambulistic encounters - that include a gregarious chanteuse (played by German punk icon Nina Hagen), actor Eddie Constantine, and a performance artist (Wolf Vostell) wearing a bread-laden suit who slowly devours his own clothing - she begins to tempt fate with acts of recklessness (most notably, in a Felliniesque high-wire balancing act and a harrowing ride on the hood of a stunt car rushing headlong towards a fire-engulfed wall). But beyond these tongue-in-cheek acts of self-destruction is also the image of transparent division and distorted perception, illustrated through recurring visuals of liquid splashed onto glass walls and mirrors (note the heroine's face to face encounter with a window washer in the airport that is repeated in her encounter with the bag lady in a taxi as she attempts to clean the windows to solicit a handout, then subsequently, in their chance meeting at a café). It is this notion of shattered images and breakdown of illusion that is reflected in the corollary bookending shots (and distinctive shoe taps) of the heroine's disembodied high heeled legs walking away from the foreground of the frame - first, through the high gloss, marble floors of the travel agency foyer, and subsequently, the parting image of a glass-tiled floor crushing under the weight of her deliberate passage - the profound isolation and ironic lucidity of a free spirit in a society of cosmetic masks and conformist rituals. Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Aug 5 2015, 01:30 PM.
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| jiricine_nvkino | Aug 5 2015, 01:33 PM Post #4 |
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http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1983/06/ulrike-ottinger-1983/ Jonathan Rosenbaum Film: The Front Line (Arden Press, 1983)
Ticket of No Return somehow manages to be two things at once: (1) an inspired development and fusion of many of the most fruitful currents in European film over the past several years — combining elements in everything from Vera Chytilova to Federico Fellini to Lothar Lambert to Jacques Rivette to Werner Schroeter to Jacques Tati (a very democratic freak salad, indeed), and (2) an uncategorizable masterpiece so sui generis that influences seem hardly relevant at all to the synthesis achieved. The nameless heroine — played by Tabea Blumenschein, a real-life clothes designer who dreamed up, designed, and made all the extravagant outfits in the film — arrives in Berlin on a one-way ticket; in the opening shot, she walks away from the camera, her bright red skirt receding like the title heroine’s yellow purse in the opening shot of Hitchcock’s Marnie, to Felliniesque music on the soundtrack, in an airport that virtually announces itself as the offspring of the Orly Airport space that opens Tati’s Playtime. An off-screen female narrator commences the story, and only the heroine’s hands are visible just before the title and subtitle (Portrait of a Woman Drinker) appear on the screen. Next come the credits, with color snapshots of each crew member lovingly placed next to her or his name (the sense of chuminess in both Ottinger films I’ve seen is an essential part of their charm, making Ottinger in one sense the Howard Hawks of the feminist avant-garde). “Berlin-Tegel-Reality,” announces a female voice on the p.a. system. The heroine again walks away from the camera, this time seen from a much lower camera angle; a male dwarf passes by, just before she approaches a glass pane being washed by a female janitor. The airport doors slide open with a wheeze; three woman dressed in prim grey outfits, known as Social Question (Magdalena Montezuma), Accurate Statistics (Orpha Termin), and Common Sense (Monika Von Cube), follow the heroine out the door in another shot whose abrupt sounds and sharp, blocky movements seem to come out of the same comic repertoire as Playtime. Formally and thematically speaking, all the basic elements of the film are already present in this opening, as soon as it’s made clear that the heroine has come to Berlin to drink herself to death. The remainder of the movie is merely a celebration that decision, rendered in as many different registers and forms of celebratory pleasure as Ottinger can get onto the screen — serving up a veritable feast of depravity and irresponsibility. ln terms of plot, then, that’s most of what Ticket of No Return has to offer: conceptually speaking, a string of episodes which repeat the same root elements, like a string of gags in a series of Road Runner cartoons (where wit always has something to do with the distinction between sameness and difference; the importance of Acme products in Chuck Jones’ conceptual schemes seems fundamental). Within this relatively static framework, however, the variables — such as the heroine’s wardrobe, the diverse narrative settings for her drinking, and diverse inventions in the dialogue and mise en scène — give the film a flamboyant, expressive range. Carrie Rickey, in an appreciative review in The Village Voice, offered an enthusiastic rundown of some of the heroine’s ensembles: “a persimmon melton overcoat and bonnet for deplaning at Berlin-Tegel airport, an Alphaville of starkness and alienation; a strapless black satin gown (reminiscent of Hayworth in Gilda) with matching opera-length gloves and oversized bow headdress, in which she chugalugs cognac at the casino; a fucshia vicuna (l kid you not) cocktail dress with rhinestone details and matching theater jacket, which she wears to a lesbian bar where she’s too drunk to boogie.” (Rickey also labeled Social Question, Accurate Statistics, and Common Sense the “Greek chorus to all of Blumenschein’s glamorous entrances…a trio clad in houndstooth…”) Early in her travels around Berlin, the heroine stumbles upon a woman identified as Drinker from the Zoo in the credits (played by Lutze), a bag lady who goes around with a shopping cart, whom she promptly invites to accompany her as a drinking companion. (Whether it’s actually Lutze who’s washing the airport panes at the beginning is not clear to me at this point, but she’s clearly already there in spirit.) And the interesting thing about this character is that she comes from another genre of filmmaking — the documentary, according to Ottinger, although one could equally equate her with neorealism — in contrast to the more Hollywoodish styling of the heroine. And it is the scandal provided by the union between these two that provides the closest thing to a consecutive plot that Ticket of No Return can claim. The heroine steps out in her strapless black satin gown; a yellow cab stops for her in extreme close-up (a blur of yellow crosses the screen); she takes a drink in the back seat; she sees some dwarfs. After the cab hits the bag lady in the street, forcing her to drop various things and denounce the driver, Social Question, Accurate Statistics, and Common Sense stop in an adjacent cab and prattle their disapproval. A man in an elevator shows the heroine a card trick; in the casino bar, he shows her dice tricks. After she steps away from the roulette table, she has a drink at the bar and breaks her glass; the bartender delivers a deadpan monologue to no one about her social behavior, dutifully repeated later in the film. On her way back to her hotel, the nameless dwarf in front of a fountain pays his respects to her. Dressed in yellow, she drinks in a café the following day while the three grey sisters cite facts and figures at an adjoining table – and the value of these in explaining alcohol to the public – while daintily devouring ice cream sundaes. The bag lady appears on the other side of the pane, is invited in by the heroine, and is served cognac. They each throw a glass of water at the glass pane, are photographed by a couple in the café, and are thrown out on the street by the management. (On the street, the couple continue to take pictures of them.) The two women repair to the heroine’s hotel room, drink wine and talk and laugh, eat oranges, and lounge around on the bed; it’s the most naturalistic scene in the film. “You’re kind,” the bag lady says. “Why are you so kind?” Waking up alone the next day, the heroine gets up in her silky bedclothes and reads in the paper about the scandal she caused in the café. After comparing her mirror reflection to her picture in the paper, she takes a drink and throws her glass at the mirror. Subsequently, she’s found drinking in a nearly empty theater (occupied only by five eerie women in black, seated in another section, who turn around to look at her in one motion), served wine by a stocky usherette; in her hotel room, watching the dwarf serving food on her black-and-white TV screen (before she removes a pair of scissors from the identical fowl on her dinner tray, and stabs a picture of herself dressed as a man); at a cabaret where an operatic soprano sings about drinking; in a café where Eddie Constantine and other “artists” sit; in a room where Bavarians eat sausages and sauerkraut and listen to a yodeler; and in a lesbian bar, where one of the gray sisters notes, “The homosexual activity is an institution, a recreational activity.” Framed by two odd sequences that audibly click as they cut from the heroine in long shot on a park bench to a close-up of one of her eyes, the heroine is seen drinking in contexts that are more fantastical and extravagant: playing Hamlet drunkenly on the stage (with audience members decrying her shocking lack of discipline); siting at office desk getting berated by her boss for drinking (while the gray trio through the door); walking on a tightrope outdoors with a parasol (the gray trio marveling that she can do it drunk, without a net); on an outdoor spiral staircase at night, speaking in English and asking for a cigarette while a drummer starts a solo on a lower level which she eventually sings and chants along with, while both the dwarf and the grey trio watch on different levels; test-driving a car through a wall of fire on an empty field, with the trio again in attendance. Later, she goes off on a ride on an aluminum-colored boat built to resemble a whale and called Moby Dick, where she’s again served wine. As the bag lady, rushing to catch up with her in the early dawn, drops some of her possessions on the street, a photographer gathers them up and takes snapshots of each one. Still later, a café manager named Willy (Cunter Meisner) goes off with the bag lady, a transvestite (Volker Spengler, a refugee from Fassbinder’s ln a Year of Thirteen Moons) gets tossed from a truck and comforted with wine by women, and the heroine passes out on some steep outdoor steps just before a crowd of people descend it (“As you make your bed, so you must lie in it,” says one of the honorable grey trio). In the final shot, though, the heroine’s back on her feet again, in another lush location, walking in high heels across a glass mirror floor, punching holes in the mirrors on either side of her as she goes. Like Freak Orlando, Ticket of No Return is a movie about body language as well as what Ottinger refers to as an inversion of narcissism; in a sense these two preoccupations are constantly being explored together. In her interview with Mueller, Ottinger noted, “Narcissism has a double face: to love only oneself is self-destruction. I am using narcissism as a metaphor for self-destruction. What interests me in particular is that narcissism always involves a certain amount of anxiety, anxieties which art never talked about. In this film these anxieties are drowned in alcohol. I thought about how to represent this anxiety for a long time. It seemed evident to me that she hates herself.” For her literally divided stance towards notions of female identity, Ottinger thus situates herself at the same crossroads occupied in their separate ways by Chantal Akerman, Sara Driver, Yvonne Rainer, Jackie Raynal, and Leslie Thornton — a crossroads where questions of sexual roles and of reading one’s self in pursuit of identity ultimately dictate the nature and focus of many of the formal decisions. Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Aug 5 2015, 02:05 PM.
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| jiricine_nvkino | Aug 5 2015, 01:40 PM Post #5 |
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xoxoxoxox
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https://books.google.cz/books?id=u5Q5xi-KsLcC&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq Thomas Elsaesser European Cinema: Face to Face With Hollywood (2005, pp. 223-225) Ulrike Ottinger, Jutta Brückner: Spectacles of Self-Estrangement A different redefinition of the auteur and of the “political” in the wake of autonomous feminism can be studied in filmmakers who turned to that area of experience where women felt most alienated from themselves. In the words of Heide Schlüpmann and Carola Gramann: “the women’s movement started simply and materialistically with what was nearest, the woman’s body, and from there tried to disentangle the violation of women’s rights and their subjection.” Yet some of the films most directly concerned with “what is nearest, the woman’s body,” such as Jutta Brückner’s Hunger Years (1979) and Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return (1979) devastatingly show that this body is much too near, too real to serve as a vantage point for a “materialist” critique. On the contrary, it is as if in these films, once the body comes into view, all perspectives crumble. Hunger Years is structured as a repetition of moments and situations around which the trauma forms that eventually reduces the adolescent heroine to bouts of, alternately, anorexia and bulimia. An autobiographical case history, Brückner wanted, through the film, once more to “identify with myself.” Although such a desire for self-exploration and self-identification is fairly typical of the auteur cinema generally, formally Hunger Years cannot be assimilated into a tradition. Also, the self with which the heroine tries to identify is the mother. The film shows how her inaccessiblity (as love object, as a source of the confirming gaze) makes the young woman direct the most intense aggression against her own body, subjected to and subjecting it to the terrible regimes and violent rhythms of hysterical bleeding, compulsive eating and self-induced vomiting. The images are marked by a violence which is only rarely present in the characters’ actions. Mostly it is the violence of the mise-en-scène itself: a lugubrious half-light, as in the closing scene, shots held for a painfully long time, episodes that make the viewer aware of the actors’ own discomfort, images difficult to watch in their naked privacy, stripping away the self-protection of a fictional role. Similar observations apply to Brückner’s One Glance – And Love Breaks Out (1987), a film made up of successive performance pieces, where different heroines stage over and over again, in a compulsive rhythm reminiscent of Pina Bausch’s dance theatre fantasies of desire, lust, self-humiliation and aggression. In Ticket of No Return the central fantasy is one of self-oblivion. Single, wealthy and beautiful, Ulrike Ottinger’s heroine makes Berlin the destination of her final binge, the “ticket of no return.” However, alcohol is merely a convenient figure signaling an urge towards self-annihilation similar to that of Brückner’s films and Sanders-Brahms’ No Mercy No Future. The body has become an intolerable carapace and prison, but infinitely available for disguise and display. Unlike Brückner and Sanders-Brahms, Ottinger makes no concessions to elemental imagery or the rawness of the flesh: every surface is polished, mirrors and metal gleams with a precise and cold reflection. Even the heroine’s attempted suicide/murder becomes a choreographed ballet of open razor blades against an impeccably coordinated bathroom wall. Nonetheless, Ottinger’s subject similarly revolves around a process obsessively repeated but ultimately failing, that of discovering a self through the other. Yet in Ticket of No Return, as in Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray (1984), the process is treated exclusively through characters hyperconscious of their self-image, whose quest to lose themselves is intertwined with the discovery of a double in the outcast and the freak or his/her lustful creation (and destruction) in and through the media/the cinema. In Ticket of No Return this “other,” so unlike the heroine and yet the very image of her own degradation and liberation is the bag lady Lutze, who joins her on her drinking bouts, pushing a supermarket shopping cart and mumbling obscene imprecations. In contrast to the heroine, adorned by fashion, dressed to kill and giving her body fantastic forms, the old lady is a shapeless bulk, grotesque and neglected. In tolerating Lutze, she succumbs to a fascination whose object one imagines to be, here too, the body of the mother. Empathy towards the face of decay and imminent death becomes almost a nostalgia for the self’s own future, and not free of its own form of aggression. Yet the real violence is directed against the heroine herself, the very stylization and beauty of Tabea Blumenschein’s appearance displayed as if to hurt the eye. With films such as Ottinger’s or Brückner’s, Basis has come a long way from the Arbeiterfilme and sociological documentaries. In Ticket of No Return three female figures, their severity and eccentricity underlined by hounds-tooth dresses, accompany the heroine like a chorus. Called “Common Sense,” “The Social Problem,” and “Reliable Statistics” they take her alcoholism literally, and are the ironic stand-in for those presumed and intended audiences who expect films to show them how to change their lives. Brückner’s emphasis in One Glance – and Love Breaks Out on the differing function of the gaze for men and women, and thus of cinematic identification, points in a similar direction. The cutting edge of their films is not (yet another form of) realism, but a mise en-scène of perversion, paranoia or schizophrenia: modes of perception and consciousness to which the cinema lends itself as no other art form. Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Aug 5 2015, 01:41 PM.
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| jiricine_nvkino | Aug 5 2015, 01:44 PM Post #6 |
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Aug 5 2015, 01:48 PM.
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| jiricine_nvkino | Aug 5 2015, 01:45 PM Post #7 |
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xoxoxoxox
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Aug 5 2015, 01:51 PM.
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| jiricine_nvkino | Aug 6 2015, 11:20 AM Post #8 |
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xoxoxoxox
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| rischka | Aug 16 2015, 02:50 AM Post #9 |
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nazi trumps fuck off!!
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i've finally started reading all this info and the film sounds absolutely fantastic! i've wanted to see an ottinger for ages so thanks jiri!! looking forward to it! and for amazing presentation as usual ![]() the punk godmother nina hagen!! Edited by rischka, Aug 17 2015, 01:38 AM.
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"covfefe" -- dj cheeto letterboxd + tumblr + twitter | |
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| jiricine_nvkino | Aug 17 2015, 06:44 AM Post #10 |
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ha, for a moment i became panic-stricken i completely missed one more feminine moustache in the film :)) btw. your surprising and thought-provoking screenshot, rischka, made me realize i never ever saw anyone who would apply different colors on upper and lower lips... to paint upper lip black or brown (or any "hair" color) and lower lip red (or none color) would be another great way for a girl how to display an ironical fake moustache... i did some research into the phenomenon and discovered these versions of color dichotomy related to upper and lower lips... ![]() ![]() ![]() seems like the only situation when upper lip is painted black is when "kitty cat make up for halloween" is being made... but in such a case it is customary to paint black also the tip of the nose... and thus such a make up is rather plainly zoomorphic than subversively feminist... ![]() ![]() the only connection between upper lip and fake moustache i could spot is this "upper lip black moustache tattoo"... ![]() Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Aug 17 2015, 06:49 AM.
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looking forward to it! and for amazing presentation as usual








7:24 PM Jul 11