At the end of Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, 1984), Dorian Gray walks through the underground sewer landscape of Berlin and into the headquarters of the media group. Slowly he unties a packet and takes out a knife, leaps onto the conference table and stabs Frau Dr Mabuse, the director of the media group, in front of the assembled media representatives who were in the process of reporting their current circulation figures. In the next scene we are in a cemetery where a camel is leading the funeral procession. Frau Dr Mabuse bows before the grave: 'Dorian, for me you're still alive.' Next scene: Dorian Gray reads the headline 'Dorian Gray Dead' in the Daily Mirror and says to his servant, Hollywood,'Stop everything - I want to dictate the end of the story.' In the credit sequence Dr Mabuse speaks again and asks the question: 'Why did I always have to kill my most talented pupils?'

Ottinger's films, like all her artistic works, resist linear readings: it is not possible to tell the story of what happens in them because they do not follow a linear plot.¹ Instead every frame of the film is carefully composed down to the tiniest detail as they interweave multiple layers of meaning. The films are full of references to literature, mythology, films, music ethnology and history; they are full of discontinuities and contradictions. Collage and montage, transformation and metamorphosis are amongst Ottinger's favourite artistic methods and devices; the boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred, as are the boundaries between the sexes. Ottinger works with a visual