EN
“This is no charitable film pleading tolerance for abnormal people. It operates with a number of tricks, but not the one most films count on - identification. It cites Tod Browning's famous 1932 film in which the cinema belies its ability to create illusions by an unimaginable display of real monsters. But this film is different. It redistributes the balance between real and artificial monstrosity. Plausibility is no problem. Its half-, double-, or non-people are not people just like me and you, neither are they better people. The head freak, the freak of the title, is based upon Virginia Woolf's Orlando, who realizes the age-old dream of androgyny. Like the Orlando of the novel, she/he is not subject to time and mortality. That alone would be enough to make him/her a monster of experience.”
Gertrud Koch
“For me, deformation is a revealing commentary on the ideal form and vice versa. In my film Freak Orlando and in the related photographs, this connection is the main theme of the narration. Here dwarfish and overlarge people, two-headed people and women without and abdomen are the main actors in a cosmos inhabited on equal terms by real and imaginary bodies. Like the eponymous character, they are sent through historical metamorphoses, until they reach their destination at a festival of the ugly in northern Italy. But where the ugly outdoes itself, it brings the beautiful forth as an outsider and curiosity. And so, the French film icon, Delphine Seyrig, in a Playboy Bunny costume, accepts the trophy; in a competition of the ugly, the beautiful is the freak par excellence. While the closing episode of the film turns into a theme on the level of narrative, what has always interested me, as well, is a question of aesthetics. So I made many photographic studies with the main actor of Freak Orlando, Magdalena Montezuma, in which she becomes a monstrous figure by using leather, metal and prosthetic accessories, or her clearly made-up features in a distorting mirror undergo a metamorphosis into abstract schemata. Form and deformation are central for me, because often their combination first makes visible the artistic work on the beautiful.
Ulrike Ottinger in conversation with Gerald Matt and Verena Konrad
“I can never set aside the sense that films like Madame X and Freak Orlando take advantage of the bodies that have been coded as different, can never parse whether they work with or against the oppression that this perceived difference catalyzed, in Ottinger’s time as well as our own. To offer a good-faith reading, these films could easily be summed up as a celebration of difference, calls for solidarity among the exploited. There’s a feminist gesture in Ottinger’s rejection of straightforward narrative and form, refusing to position the women who populate her films in line with the cinematographically-constructed demands of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ that, even by the 1970s and ‘80s, dominated mass-cultural representations of women onscreen. Yet that same disavowal, in denying any narrative framing that might elucidate the films’ underlying politics, can make them feel, at times, more like pageants – trotting out the ‘strange’ and ‘zany’ to an indeterminate end.”
Adina Glickstein
