Die Blutgräfin

After more than twenty years of focussing on documentaries, Ulrike Ottinger returns to the camp exoticism and historical fantasy of such classics as FREAK ORLANDO (1981). In DIE BLUTGRÄFIN, Isabelle Huppert delivers a riveting performance as the crimson-clad titular noblewoman in a story written in collaboration with Elfriede Jelinek and loosely inspired by the life of Elizabeth Báthory. A Hungarian countess with a penchant for women, Báthory was convicted of serial murder in the early seventeenth century and subsequently became fodder for myths of blood-sucking and the undead. In Ottinger’s film, she turns up in contemporary Vienna, on the hunt for a book with the power to transform vampires into mortal beings by making them cry. Elizabeth’s search, undertaken with her faithful maid Hermine (Birgit Minichmayr), is a comic caper replete with a vegetarian nephew determined to resist his family’s sanguinous appetites (Thomas Schubert), a visit to the pathological anatomical collection housed at the Narrenturm, and a recurring cameo by Conchita Wurst. Make no mistake: despite the MacGuffin of the fabled book, this is not a film about literature’s power to move us but rather a romp that seizes upon the flamboyance of the image to dazzle and delight. (Erika Balsom)

In the presence of Ulrike Ottinger and on October 24th of Isabelle Huppert and Birgit Minichmayr.

Ulrike Ottinger (selection): LAOKOON & SÖHNE (1972, K), MADAME X – EINE ABSOLUTE HERRSCHERIN (1977), BILDNIS EINER TRINKERIN (1979), FREAK ORLANDO (1981), DORIAN GRAY IM SPIEGEL DER BOULEVARD- PRESSE (1984), JOHANNA D’ARC OF MONGOLIA (1989), TAIGA (1992), EXIL SHANGHAI (1997), PRATER (2007), THE KOREAN WEDDING CHEST (2009), UNDER SNOW (2011), PARIS CALLIGRAMMES (2019)