The Conquest of the Happy Islands – A Colonial Opera

Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942, Konstanz, Germany) is a German filmmaker, documentarian photographer, and professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
In the experimental film Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984), Ottinger takes up the character of Dorian Gray (played by Veruschka von Lehndorff) and uses him/her to explore the seamier side of Berlin night and street life. Ottinger’s Dorian Gray matches wits with none other than Dr. Mabuse, who has transformed from Fritz Lang’s underworld kingpin into an ambitious media tycoon (played by Delphine Seyrig). Central to the film is the ‘opera’ sequence that is set in a theatre and shows a baroque opera from colonial times.
As Ottinger says about the work: ‘The illustrations painted on [the theatre frame] attest to the exoticism of the colonial opera. Scenes of an opera performed within the frame are set in the early stages of the Spanish Inquisition and deal with the conquest of the Isle of Bliss. It’s a multi-faceted construction: outside the frame there is the story of Frau Dr. Mabuse, the boss of an international media concern, and Dorian Gray, her student, victim, and rival. I placed the markedly artificial frame in a natural landscape. The curtain opens and nature becomes an operatic stage. Another shot shows a wall of rock with a cavity that with the addition of drapery becomes a theater box. From there, Dr. Mabuse and Dorian Gray watch themselves in the opera, in their roles on stage as Grand Inquisitor of Seville and the young Spanish Infant. There’s a view into the frame but also out from it. And there are the characters’ own views of themselves. Art frames nature: the sea in the background is real but the clouds and sky are painted parts of the frame. I like to work with these kinds of trompe-l’oeil effects. It creates the possibility to reflect the relationship between art and nature.’