In 1959 Ulrike Ottinger began studying at the Academy of Arts in Munich and worked as a painter. Her mother, Maria Weinberg, was a journalist and her father, Ulrich Ottinger, was a painter.
From 1962 to 1968, Ottinger worked as a freelance artist in Paris and studied etching with Johnny Friedlaender among other studies. They participated in several exhibitions.
The films of Ottinger have been said to "reject or parody the conventions of art cinema and search for new ways to construct visual pleasure, creating various spectator positions usually neglected or marginalized by cinematic address".[2] Her films include strong elements of stylization and fantasy, as well as ethnographic explorations.[3]
In 1966 she wrote her first screenplay, entitled Die Mongolische Doppelschublade.
Ottinger returned to West Germany in 1969 and, in cooperation with the Film Seminar at the University of Konstanz, founded the film club "Visuell", which she directed until 1972. She also headed a gallery and the associated "galeriepress”, where they edited works by contemporary artists.
During this time she met Tabea Blumenschein and Magdalena Montezuma [de], both of whom have been cast as lead actresses in her films since 1972. Ottinger developed her own bizarre surrealist film-style, which among other things, was marked by widespread abandonment of a linear plot and instead linger long in individual scenes, which in turn make überstarke and extravagant costumes of the imagination mostly female cast artfully to own collages were designed.
In 2003, Ottinger was selected for a solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. Titled South East Passage, the work "is in three chapters - a travelogue of the artist's journey from southeast Poland to the Bulgarian shores of the Black Sea and a portrait of two coastal cities, Odessa and Istanbul". South East Passage was the first of a two-part series of exhibits exploring Eastern European video work.[6]
On the occasion of the 2009 New York premiere of The Korean Wedding Chest, with Ottinger to be in attendance, The New York Times characterized the director as, "[d]uring the 1980s heyday of the New German Cinema, having constituted a one-woman avant-garde opposition to the sulky male melodramas of Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog, her films being long, discursive and wildly inventive."[7]
Ottinger's films, with their preference for the Far Eastern formal language is visible, turned in the following decades, some unconventional documentaries about life in various Asian regions. Ottinger was to direct the horror-drama film Die Blutgräfin,[8] based on the life of Elisabeth Bathory;[9] however, the project has not been produced as of January 2015.
