The veteran German visual artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger had three films in the World Focus section of the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival: a new feature starring Isabelle Huppert called The Blood Countess, the first installment of her famous Berlin Trilogy from 1979 called Ticket of No Return, and a documentary, Under Snow, set in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, that was made in 2011.
 
During the TIFF Lounge TOKYO TALK – An Evening of German Cinema on November 1, Ottinger mentioned that, as a filmmaker, she is not really interested in delving into psychological issues. “I work through a cinema of images,” she said, “in which everything is told through the images themselves.”
 
When asked to elaborate on this sensibility during an interview in the TIFF offices on November 3, the 84-year-old artist became animated in describing how it applied to The Blood Countess, which is about a real person, the 16th- and 17th-century Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, who visits Vienna as a nominal tourist in the 21st century, though her real purpose is to suck blood, since she is a vampire.
 
“Vampires are very interesting images,” she says, “because they can live forever, so the past, the present, and the future are all at once. Elizabeth Báthory was very powerful in her day, but I don’t believe all the things that were written about her (legend has it she was a serial killer) or all that intrigue surrounding the Habsburg Empire. I was just interested in the fantasy possibilities.”
 

 
These possibilities were realized when Huppert came on board to play the countess. “It was unusual for her to play this iconic character,” said Ottinger. “She’s used to playing normal people, but she’s fantastic. In the beginning, she would say, ‘The character doesn’t have emotions, how should I react?’, and I’d tell her, ‘You are powerful, you just have to be there. You don’t even have to talk because people with that kind of power don’t need to, all they have to do is point at what they want’.”
 
The protagonist of Ticket of No Return is similarly privileged and doesn’t talk at all in the movie, but her goal is the opposite of the countess’s: she desires self-annihilation, and goes to Berlin to literally drink herself to death, not out of melancholy but out of an affirmation of her addiction to alcohol. She’s going to die doing what she loves most, and the movie ends up being a guilt-free travelogue of Berlin’s diverse drinking culture in the late ’70s.
 
When asked if she found all of these things funny—vampires propping up imperialism, drunkards making the morally upright uncomfortable—Ottinger said simply, “Daily life is funny. If you observe it carefully, you see a lot of impossible situations.”
 
Right now, she is working on a play that will have its world premiere in Berlin this winter. It is based on the novel The Hearing Trumpet by the late British-Mexican painter Leonora Carrington, an old-school European surrealist.
 
“Her humor is typically British,” Ottinger explains. “I met her in Chicago in the early 90s when I was having a retrospective there. The adaptation features ten old actresses and is very funny. In the story, an old woman receives a hearing trumpet and learns her family is planning to put her in a nursing home, where she becomes acquainted with other elderly ladies and the two owners, who are religious fanatics—and then there is revolution! It’s fun.”
 
Though Under Snow is by definition less whimsical than her fiction films because it’s a documentary, Ottinger insists that her interest in making it was mostly conceptual. She stumbled on a German translation of the book Hokuetsu Seppu by Suzuki Bokushi, a collection of tales about the Echigo region of Japan, in a secondhand bookstore some years ago and wanted to see the region for herself. The town she visited, Tokamachi, is buried under many meters of snow six months out of the year.
 
“For me, it’s fascinating when people live in areas or under conditions where they have to improvise in order to live,” Ottinger said. “And they do it so positively.”
 
Another attraction for her is that the people of Tokamachi perform Kamikawate Kabuki, designated an Intangible Folk Cultural Property by Tokamachi City, in the snow. Kabuki, with its strictly stylized movements and diction, is exactly the kind of theatrical experience Ottinger loves, and in the film she has two professional kabuki actors play out a fantasy of corporeal transformation rooted in the region’s folk art.
 
“I first saw kabuki in Paris in the 1960s,” she recalls. “Then when I went to Japan for the first time I saw kabuki and bunraku and noh and really enjoyed it.”
 
Eventually, she even incorporated kabuki into her own theater work, specifically an adaptation of the play The Betrothal in the Fairy Realm by the 19th-century playwright Johann Nestroy for an arts festival in Graz, Austria.
 

 
The play shifts back and forth between the fairy realm and life on earth, and Ottinger felt that kabuki was a good way to present the former. “I wanted an artistic way to bring together two worlds that weren’t meant to be together, the world of ghosts and the world of the living,” she said. “The festival gave me carte blanche, so I used kabuki players, and we arrived at a kind of synergy, with Japanese characters and German characters. I had this great onnagata (kabuki actor who specializes in female roles) who did this amazing dance in the wind. And you know how in kabuki the musicians are right there on stage with the actors? I did that, too, but I also had a yodeler on stage who represented the real-life realm on earth. In a way yodeling and the kind of singing done in kabuki is similar.”
 
The shoot in Tokamachi for Under Snow was quite difficult, but Ottinger fortunately had the help of the famous Japanese novelist Tawada Yoko, who also lives in Berlin and writes in both Japanese and German. “She not only did the interpretation,” said Ottinger, “she was very good at understanding the cultural background, so we had very good relations with the locals right from the start. If people know you’re sincerely interested in them, they will open up to you fully, so after ten days Yoko had to leave because she had other obligations, but I could stay without any problem.”
 
“What’s particularly amazing about these people is that they all do kabuki in their spare time,” she added. “So when they found out I came just to see their kabuki, they went crazy.”
 
Related Article: Read our report on the TIFF Lounge TOKYO TALK – An Evening of German Cinema, held on November 1.