Since 1974, German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has created a substantial body of films that explore a world of difference defined by the tension and transfer between settled and nomadic ways of life. In many of her films, she also probes the encounter with the other, whether exotic or simply unpredictable. This book offers a series of sensitive and original analyses of Ottinger's films, as well as her more recent photographic artworks, situated within a dazzling thought experiment centered on the history of art cinema through the turn of the twenty-first century.