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Ticket of No Return (Bildnis einer Trinkerin) + introduction by Helen de Witt (15*)

Queer 70s

,Cinema 3
A woman in a red coat and red hat stands in front of a window with her hand placed up on the glass.

A glamourous woman arrives in West Berlin, begins a drinking spree and forms a relationship with another woman in UIrike Ottinger’s droll, visually striking odyssey. 

Tabea Blumenschein commands the screen in UIrike Ottinger’s playful and wonderfully bizarre trip through West Berlin. She plays an immaculately dressed, unnamed woman (Blumenschein also designed the jaw-dropping costumes) whose drunken mission is accompanied by a Greek chorus who comment on her behaviour. Along the way, she encounters another woman with whom she begins a semi-romantic relationship.

A plot synopsis cannot do justice to Ottinger’s weird tale, which features appearances from contemporary pop culture figures such as Eddie Constantine and Nina Hagen. The visuals are beautiful in their strangeness and Ticket of No Return is one of Ottinger’s best and most accessible works. It includes a glorious scene in a lesbian bar, where the chorus note with interest that Berlin is the 'centre of homosexuality'. Three cheers to that.

Tagged with: Cinema Queer 70s

In German with English subtitles

Helen de Witt is a curator, lecturer and writer teaching at UCL, Birkbeck and NFTS. She is a trustee of the Slow Film Festival and a member of queer feminist collective Club Des Femmes.

Film information

Release year: 1979

Country: West Germany

Director: Ulrike Ottinger

Runtime: 1 hour 47 min

Ticket prices

£10.40

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'I saw it when I was 19, and it had a decisive influence on me in wanting to become a filmmaker. I felt I hadn’t seen a female character played with that kind of abandon on film until then. It’s the boldness of the way she made that film. It’s very stylised, very theatrical. It felt like Ottinger was a part of a family of artists making films' 

Director Joanna Hogg (Archipelago, The Souvenir Parts I and II)

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