Film Screening
Ulrike Ottinger at 80: Ticket of No Return

Goethe-Kino (Cinema Screening)

Wed, 28.09.2022
7:00 PM

In June this year Ulrike Ottinger turned 80. To celebrate this occasion and to mark the handing over of a new book in English dedicated to her to the publisher (Berghan)* this September we are showing two of Ottinger’s films. In our cinema we will be screening her 1979 new wave influenced Berlin odyssey Ticket of No Return. For audiences beyond London we are now able to show her autobiographical essay film Paris Caligrammes (2020) on our streaming platform Goethe on Demand.

For our cinema screening we chose the visually stunning Ticket of No Return, having shown or supported screenings of the other parts of Ottinger’s so called Berlin-Trilogy, the The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press (1981) and Freak Orlando (1984), in the past. But we are not just showing Ticket of No Return for the sake of completeness. It is also to remind us that apart from Paris and all the world’s destinations that Ottinger has visited for her documentaries, the island of West Berlin in the 70s and 80s with its non-conformist culture has also been an important location in Ottinger’s life and work. It is also to meet again some of the people that Ottinger regularly worked with, not last Tabea Blumenstein, who plays the spectacularly dressed protagonist of this film.

Book Tickets Through Eventbrite

The screening will be introduced by Professor Angela McRobbie.

Instead of a synopsis, here an excerpt from the opening of the film:  “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.”

Germany 1979, DCP (35mm), colour, 107 mins. With English subtitles
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger. With Tabea Blumenschein, Lutze, Magdalena Montezuma, Orpha Termin, Monika von Cube, Nina Hagen.