As soon as we turned our backs on the train, it ceased to exist

[sovay]

Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989) is one of the best things I have ever seen in my life. I was going to write that it is a crime against humanity that this movie is not available on DVD from Criterion, but it looks as though copies can be ordered through the director's website, so I am going to hold off on calling down the wrath of Tengri and Angela Carter just yet. It's hilarious and otherworldly, stylized and documentary, full of old ritual and Yiddish theater standards, and while I have read stories and poems like it, I've never seen anything comparable on a screen. I loved it very much.

Ottinger's current project is Die Blutgräfin—The Blood Countess—from whose title you may correctly guess the subject is Erszébet Báthory. She will be portrayed by Tilda Swinton. With vampires, in Vienna. It is possible there will not be enough awesome in the world to describe this film.

These discoveries have seriously improved my day.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it was every bit as enchanting as nineweaving remembered it. Wonderful. Glad you got to go.

Yiddish theater standards--do you mean certain items that always turn up in Yiddish theater?

[sovay]

Glad you got to go.

I hope someday you have the chance to see it!

Yiddish theater standards--do you mean certain items that always turn up in Yiddish theater?

Songs that have become famous, that everyone knows; one of the characters in the first half of the film is a Yiddish theater star named Mickey Katz, who performs a version of "Toot-Toot-Tootsie, Goodbye" that winds up incorporating lines or musical quotes from half a dozen (or more) well-known classics of Yiddish film or theater. It was kind of breathtaking.