The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors

With glitter, feathers and gender-bending sailors, Ulrike Ottinger’s rarely screened early experimental film sets the scene for her work to come.

An exotic sea laps upon the sands of a distant beach, and a woman in an extravagant red gown and matching headdress crosses the dunes, singing. Gay sailors in classic white-and-blue uniforms kiss (years before French artists Pierre et Gilles made such imagery iconic). A woman in a leopard-print party dress fringed with pink, cake-like layers settles in for a solo picnic, while another woman in full-feathered bird regalia prowls nearby, her tinselled wings shimmering in the light. Scantily clad characters cavort and canoodle with bacchanalian pleasure.

An assemblage of vivid imagery, The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors was Ulrike Ottinger’s second mid-length experimental film, following Laocoon & Sons: The Story of the Transformation of Esmeralda del Rio (1972/73), and her first in riotous colour. Notably, it is the only work in Ottinger’s filmography that she shares a directorial credit on: joining her at the helm here is her partner and frequent collaborator Tabea Blumenschein, who also oversaw the film’s costumes and make-up. Both women appear onscreen, with Ottinger playing the “Nymph of German Romanticism” alongside influential queer filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives) as one of the titular sailors.

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival