Tabea Blumenschein and Ulrike Ottinger | Madame X - Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X: An Absolute Ruler) / 1978

the women’s collective of death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ulrike Ottinger (screenplay), Tabea Blumenschein and Ulrike Ottinger (directors) Madame X - Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X: An Absolute Ruler) / 1978

 

Obviously, Virginia Woolf’s fictional biography Orlando was central to Ulrike Ottinger’s early films. The figure first appears in her 1972-73 work Laocoon & Son and is the central focus of her 1978 prequel Madame X: An Absolute Ruler to her “Berlin Trilogy,” the centerpiece of which is Freak Orlando (1981). Using yet another trope of feminine empowerment, this Madame X is a brutal sea pirate, who like James M. Barrie’s Captain Hook has lost one of her hands in an attempt to save her female lover Orlando from a poisonous species of sea anemone which she thought was a flower, and dived in to retrieve.

      Calling out to women around the world to join her, Madame X accrues an odd assortment of females representing various stereotypes of unhappy women, both lesbians and formerly heterosexually married individuals, among them a housewife whose husband has left her for another woman, Betty Brillo (Lutze, who will later be central to Ticket with No Return); a worn-out artist seeking new subjects and landscapes, Joseph de Collage who roller skates away from her entrapment (noted dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer); a German woman living outdoors with her trusty rifle at hand, Flora Tannenbaum (Claudia Skoda); a beautiful “Tahitian” girl, punished by her husband for some action or inaction by being manacled and sent off in a small paddle raft, Noa-Noa (Roswitha Janz); along with a medical psychologist and a female pilot—all lured by her calls for “gold, love, and adventure.”

     While these may on one level represent various feminist figures, they are also presented by Ottinger as satirical, and many of the women taken aboard by the Orientalist figurehead—Madame X also serves as the maidenhead of her dinghy—do not survive the voyage, some of them destroyed by their leader herself. And although at moments the women do join together in a kind of feminist collective, just as often they plot, bicker, and gossip against one another. Neither are all of them true to the lesbian cause, Betty Brillo, in particular, later being punished for her interest in a sailor illegally brought aboard.

      When early in their voyage they also bring on board a castrato/fool, Belmondo (Mackay Taylor) who has been set afloat by a crew aboard a wealthy yacht simply for being so “different,” one might almost argue that Madame X’s dinghy acquires a slightly “rainbow” quality. But even the obvious effeminate “fairy” is so kooky and bizarre in his behavior that the medical psychologist immediately interviews him in a hilarious series of quick-fired questions which accuse him more than attempt to explore his peculiarities.

      One of the first things the crew must accomplish is to simply attract the attention of their cruel and absolute ruler, who seems oblivious of their presence, so much so that fear they might never even be served something to eat. Through a lottery it is decided that Noa-Noa will be the one to approach her.

    The encounter at first results in a fury of hostility (with the help of the canned sound of snarling tiger), but gradually as the Tahitian offers her onions and, the most absurd of offerings, large flowers of broccoli, as well as her own enticing body, Madame is calmed as Noa-Noa and her make symbolic gestures of love, the girl becoming her favorite thereafter.

     Almost immediately after this quite charming enticement, Madame X orders her ferocious-looking servant Hoi Sin (obviously jealous of her master’s attentions to Noa-Noa) to feed her crew with a large Chinese cooked fish, which the hungry female collective consume with the speed of a gathering of locusts.

      When the speechless Belmondo mimes the story of his being cast away, he describes the yacht filled with the mindless well-to-to individuals that have had no place for him, Madame X determines the course of the first (and only) adventure depicted in this film, which is clearly meant to be an ongoing series like the old silent serials such as the Fantômas crimes series of the 1920s or the Pirate Gold series of the same decade.

 

     Catching up with yacht, the dinghy provides the rich and bored people on cruise such an exotic sight filled with magnificently dressed (and in Noa-Noa’s case undressed) beings that they invite them aboard, muttering endless banalities and oohing-and-awing over the strangeness of these figures as they poke and prod them like so many pieces of art, snapping photos as if on one of Ottinger’s later ethnographic visits to an alien world. A wheelchair-bound female singer serves as the center of the fatuous folk looked after by beautiful young sailor and others who might serve their sexual needs.

     Madame X and her crew, sans Belmondo, allow themselves to be the subjects of outsider fascination until the sun sets when one-by-one they kill off the entire batch of the idol and rich and plunder their safes below deck of jewels and money.   The young sailor, however, dives overboard and swims to the dingy crying out for help, where the confused Belmondo saves him and the two, enwrapped in a small cocoon of a glass-surrounded room begin to make love so intensely that they do not, at first, even recognize the return of the pirates, who stare in intently at their love-making, Betty Brillo, in particular, becoming so jealous that even when the others report the incident to their cruel leader and she has put the sailor upon a net hanging over the waters, Betty is still determined to join him, as is Belmondo who fight for possession of the beauty.

     Belmondo finally gives up, and as Betty crawls into the net in an attempt to have sex with the

sailor, they are dropped together into the ocean, only Belmondo escaping death. His punishment by Madame X soon after is surprisingly allayed in a gesture of mercy that she does not show the others who soon after begin to resist her cruel behavior. One by one, some of her crew members are killed off for their various mutinies and offences. The pilot is poisoned with cake (see the second photo in this essay). 

     After taking a long bath, the hairy-chested Madame X orders Belmondo and another to kill someone watching nearby.

     Another is killed as she attempts to stab Madame X as she performs her role as the maidenhead (see the first image of the essay).  Finally, as they reach port, she has the medical psychologist who has kept a private log of her wrongdoings, shot through by an arrow.

     What Madame X has not warned these women is that their servitude in the new cause may also result in their deaths.

     Back in port, Madame X and her dinghy magically attract a whole new series of women, a hot-dog stand owner, a park sweeper dressed in what looks like a prison uniform, and others who are the same actors, in many cases, as the previous ones she has destroyed in their former personas, as if they have metamorphosed into new women desiring “gold, love, and adventure.” Indeed, this time the voyage is treated almost as a park ride, as the women sail out of port almost as if they soon will be returning from a tour adventure not so very different from the one of those on the doomed yacht.

     As in nearly all of Ottinger’s works, it is the visual splendor of her images and cinematic wit that most matters. Nothing is ever truly predictable in the world in which this director takes her adventurous viewers, and every time one takes the cinematic voyage with her, new discoveries are there to be uncovered.

 

Los Angeles, December 5, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).