Ulrike Ottinger's films teeter between fiction and documentary, and between an attitude of knowing critical distance and seeming sincerity. At first glance this tension appears to map neatly onto her career, with the ironic pastiches of the early Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1978), Ticket of No Return (1979) and The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press (1984), followed by the experimental ethnographic styles of such films as China: The Arts - Everyday Life (1986), TaigaExile Shanghai (1997).

In his text 'My Last Interview with Ulrike Ottinger: On Southeast Passage and Beyond', Laurence Rickels notes that shortly after the release of Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989) critics hastened to mark a 'before' and 'after' point in Ottinger's career. But as Rickels implies, this gesture to some extent belies Ottinger's 'dual - and in every film moment double - investment in fictional art cinema and documentary film'.¹

Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia seems to occupy the fulcrum of this binary opposition in Ottinger's oeuvre. Its two-part structure folds over an internal fulcrum, making the film metonymic of the oeuvre as a whole. The film's two sections dramatise a clash not only between cultures, but also between filmmaking styles. The first hour of the film introduces a motley group of European, Russian and American travellers aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway. These characters, like many of their predecessors in Ottinger's work, seem to typify or allegorise particular imagos and worldviews. The ilm takes a detour when, in a scene reminiscent of Joseph von Sternberg's imagos The Shanghai Express (1932), the train is brought to a halt in the middle of the Gobi desert by a nomadic tribe of Mongolians