Ulrike Ottinger’s unforgettably bold and bizarre take on Virginia Woolf’s gender-changing hero has to be seen to be believed.
Years before Sally Potter’s Orlando and Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography came queer icon Ulrike Ottinger’s wild, sprawling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s gender-changing time traveller, Orlando, played by cult actor Magdalena Montezuma. Alongside residents of so-called ‘Freak City’, Orlando bounces from a modern department store to the Middle Ages to the Spanish Inquisition, encountering weird and wonderful characters on the way.
The film came at the beginning of a wave of queer cinema works made in the last decade of West Germany’s existence. Ottinger’s work with a variety of unconventional actors, the depiction of disabilities and the diversity of the human form, continues to be provocative to this day. It invites us to challenge our own ways of thinking about Queerness and the way we live and conceive it.