by Douglas Messerli
Ulrike Ottinger (screenplay and director) Freak Orlando /
1981
One might almost
describe the work as a kind of camp horror-film that alternates with scenes of
gentle love and tenderness—even if, as in Madame X’s world, the later don’t
last very long. The work, indeed, is filled with contradictions. Clearly a
feminist-influenced piece, as in most of her cinema Ottinger purposely
frustrates her feminist admirers by creating a nebulous moral compass that
itself points at various moments in different directions. And the lack of a
clear declaration of values as opposed to the total wonderment of difference no
matter how loathsome it might become sometimes serves as a block to even the
most opened-eyed liberal. Despite her work’s obvious political intentions, time
and again Ottinger refuses to make declare moral judgement.
In her essay,
“Ulrike Ottinger’s Strange Subversions,” Adina Glickstein nicely summarizes
some of these issues while describing important perspectives of the film:
“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.
The second
installment in the Berlin trilogy, Freak Orlando, is one such showboat
of spectacle. The titular “freaks”—gay men, bearded women, people with dwarfism
and other physical disabilities—cavort through bleak West German landscapes
that resist placement in space or time, moving from mystical department stores
to coal fields and fairgrounds. BDSM leather daddies are elevated to the level
of righteous religious self-flagellants, their procession punctuating the film
with ecstatic grunts as they wander between sooty industrial scenes. Freak
Orlando is a raucous celebration of extremity, a cavalcade of strangeness
unburdened by narrative constraints. Nothing about it wants for a storyline,
but perhaps in part because its form is so arcane, its ethical implications are
also completely confounding. Is it a jubilant invitation to embrace divergence?
Or rather, does it come across an uncritical caricature, its depiction of
diversity less satire than ridicule? For all the ways in which Ottinger’s early
filmography feels outside of time, it also telegraphs a sense of ethnographic
excess that is distinctly of its era.”
I’ll briefly
summarize these episodes in order to provide a broad sense of a work that must
be seen in order to make any sense.
The First
Episode consists of a character named Orlando Zyklopa (Magdalena Montezuma) who
arrives at the Freak City gates, pauses before a naked buried torso (a kind of
Mother Earth-Venus figure all in one), and enters, soon working with her own
seven dwarf-shoemakers in a futuristic shopping mall, in what appears to be an
instant shoe repair that primarily destroys the footwear while stamping them as
her creation with a huge anvil. The customers grow angry and she and her dwarfs
are chased away by the crowds and the store manager, Herbert Zeus (Herbert
Zeus). The dwarfs, two intertwined dancers who reappear throughout the work
(Claudio Pantoja and Hiro Uchiyama) make their way to a forest where they hide
themselves in a tree which becomes a kind Trojan Horse. Soon after as they make
their way to another location they discover a sacred stylite to whom a group of
city flagellants, who look like crazed Tom of Finland leather boys, also make
their annual pilgrimage. But just before their arrival, the stylite begins to
move, naming Orlando as his successor, before he falls to his death. The
citizens of the tourist spot insist that she must immediately replace him since
the BDSM boys travel there each year just to see him, spending a great deal of
money of their decadent pleasures after. When she refuses, the villagers of the
holy shrine murder her.
The Third Episode tells of Orlando Capricho, now captivated by a special travel offer made by the Freak City department store, but learns to distrust her mirror image. She falls into the hands the Spanish Inquisition persecutors and the 18th century, and locked in cages with other significant figures of the day, barely escapes, deported with other great men and women, including Galileo and Einstein.
Now Mr. Orlando,
he is engaged at the entrance of a psychiatric ward by freak-artistes of a
side-show traveling throughout the country, headed by Helena Müller (Delphine
Seyrig, who also plays several other roles throughout the work). Orlando falls
in love with the left side of Siamese-twin sisters, Lena, the other named Leni.
Together they have a baby, but Leni, distraught over Lena’s having found a
lover, becomes an alcoholic, the two fighting day and night, Lena not being
able to live her life due to her sister’s alcoholism. The baby constantly
cries, and Orlando, trying to stop their intense bickering finally shoots Leni
dead, obviously killing his beloved Lena as well. The head of the troupe is now
forced to sentence Mr. Orlando to death in compliance with the age-old
tradition of artistes.
In the final
Fifth Episode, Mrs. Orlando, called Freak Orlando because of her special
orientation, has become an entertainer, touring with four Playboy-like
“bunnies” (Jackie Raynal, Jill Lucas, Vivian Lucas, and Beate Kopp), a special
attraction of shopping centers and family celebrations, etc. Now host to the
annual Festival of Ugliness, she performs before a party of handicapped
veterans (the former BDSM boys) and others, crowning the winner with a trophy inscribed:
“Limping is the way of the crippled.” The award this year goes to a passing
traveling salesman who has not even entered as a contestant. The festival ends,
and Orlando’s story is over, as she makes her way, limping, out of Freak City,
pausing once again before the nude, half buried living statue.
But Ottinger
clearly draws on her own nearly endless imagination for the largest part of her
totally engaging tableaux, with figures you cannot easily forget even if they
often seem beyond comprehension. Who might have imagined the scene where. as
Orlando Capricho is dressed in a gown featuring Christmas Tree lights, the
bearded saint of Wilgeforte nailed to a cross sings an aria of her family
troubles while acting out the entire holy trinity: her father, her mother, and
herself? She is accompanied by an acolyte who holds on a pole before her at all
times a martini, a bit like the water served up a sponge to Christ by a
guard. Or a dinner party where the naked
guests, wearing blindfolds must reach in through barbed wire for their drinks
to toast their goodbyes to freedom? Or, finally, a dance routine with the Tom
of Finland boys (Luc Alexandeer, Jochen Benner, Klaus Dechert, Polo Espinoza,
Dan van Husen, Reinhard v. d. Marwitz, Jörg Matthey, Stefan Menche, Konrad
Regber, Peter Schmittinger, and Emile Snytscheuvet) on crutches? Only Ottinger
could conjure up these scenes.
This is a world
of queer folk, all outsiders who are unable to fit into any other world but
their own. Or perhaps all the others simply can’t fit into their various
societies. According to Ottinger, it appears, a freak is just someone whom the
others in the neighborhood can’t explain.
Los Angeles, December 1, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment