Notes From Oberhausen Short Film Festival
Notes From Oberhausen Short Film Festival-- May 1-6 2019 Oberhausen, Germany
Throughout its sixty-five years, Oberhausen Short Film Festival has existed in the spirit of its legendary manifesto, annually calling to action filmmakers (and the mechanisms supporting them) by compiling hundreds of avant-garde, cinematic films each clocking in at under thirty-five minutes, all attempting to break free of a dominant [cinematic?] culture.
Organizing my thoughts on the intense onslaught of over six hundred shorts-- from the sublime to the utterly exhausting, from a sidebar on film trailers to a focus on celluloid art labs-- feels impossible so below is a list of key takeaways and film highlights from the whirlwind week of images, experiences and ideas behind the red velvet curtains of Oberhausen.
1. There is no one cinematic language, cinema is not a monoculture.
Oberhausen, sometimes referred to as the Detroit of Germany given its post-industrial decline and resulting identity crisis, has welcome refugees in huge numbers, naturally creating tension but also opportunity. A local group united through a German language program were given access to films, picking the ones that spoke to them the most. One audience member noted afterward that it was rude to ask this of a group lacking in cinematic language. But to me, a new cinematic language emerged through their choices. Many of the films in the program employed voice-over, maybe expressing a kinship to the disembodied voice, or maybe a preoccupation with voice as they were all in a language class? The program made me appreciate that cinema is multilingual, a feeling, an intuition, a tradition of symbols and image-making that naturally unfurls for an audience, even if that audience is narrowed to the point of a single person.
Profile: Spinning light, weaving light (dir. Kayako Oki/Japan/2011-2019)
After being rejected from film school, Kayako Oki ended up in a textile program eventually using her tactile, fabric-based skills to invent a new form she calls “textilm.” The profile program of her work allowed one to watch her grow and explore. A supreme example of her experimentation was found in Textilm vol.9 The Whispers of Indi-Go, a documentary on the making of the pigment indigo in which remnants of the process were smashed onto the film itself making each viewing experience slightly altered as the material fades, chips and moves through the projector. Her final piece in the series, Textilm vol. 10 Träumerei, featured a long, fabric train of printed cloth, a sculptural artifact printed to mimic film sprockets, hand-illustrated “cel by cel,” then photographed onto film. The obsessive dedication and unrefined beauty in her work spoke to curiosity and form, her own vision at times overlapping with experimental film traditions wavering between naive simplicity and extreme intention. Kayako Oki’s work resonates with the Japanese aesthetic Wabi Sabi, a manifestation of imperfect transience, an enigmatic truth and impermanence that perfectly purrs through each turn of the projector, soft light beam, and manipulated film strip.
September 3rd 2015 (dir. Sara Jurinčić/Croatia/2018)
A headline reads that a man was hospitalized after a fight over a parking space, the account rehashed over and over by a calm, propelling voice over. Slowly the words devolve as details drip away, moments repeat, only numbers remain, a feeling of loss permeates and hand-cut abstract collage pieces (in a Russian Constructivist meets teen bedroom mirror) dance to the eroding story. Eventually, a hidden camera enters what appears to be a hospital or convalescence center, presenting a vague uncertainty of whether a connection between the newspaper incident and the room exists at all. The film becomes a meditation on forgetting and remembering, on how distractions/art/headlines/fragments can so easily replace the things one doesn’t want to be. The cogitating rhythm of the film becomes a trance, a masterful reduction roiling in this brilliant film debut that forces one to face the smallest units of the human-- and filmic-- condition.
3. Cinema is a medium of media.
Oberhausen prides itself on taking a collage approach to its programming, composing programs (supposedly) without intention to let the meaning in juxtaposition flourish-- like an accidental Eisenstein. The same feeling was present in the films themselves this year as they reached out into all media to piece together style and meaning. The tradition of cinema and collage isn’t new but, the barrage of this style felt like a reflection of the changing, offscreen culture as films used things like social media and youtube as raw resources while also favoring a more historical approach through still images and handmade craft-- both modes pushing against the immediacy of today’s fast-paced image culture.
Deconstructing Reality in the Making (dir. Katharina Barbosa Blad/Norway/2018)
Considered a music video for the band “PopInDustTree,” Blad’s short film was a parade of paper collages that completely destabilized any understanding of solidity. Carefully cut out, assembled images from what looked like vintage magazines or books presented themselves on screen, strange compositions of interiors, realism with a touch of surrealism that defined a distinct place and time through each new tableau. Slowly, the coherent scenes deconstructed, the pieces of the whole individually removed to expose a multitude of disparate pieces-- think analog photoshop layering in reverse. The blanket stillness and tempered revelation completely flipped my sense of space, time and trust with such simplistic-- yet expertly rendered!-- structure that my mind was just blown! A perfect example of the ability of film to reimagine reality, a slow peeling away of cognitive expectation that keeps the viewer engaged and questioning, an undermining of perception that follows one long after exiting the theater.
L’Étoile de mer (dir. Maya Schweizer/Germany/2019)
Film loves film and L’Étoile de mer strikes a perfect balance between film fetish and film art. It is an abstract portrait of the beach, the underwater depths of life and the onshore arrival of guests to luminous sandy locales. The film is also a skillfully rendered montage of archival film (though I can’t find an index, I’m pretty sure names like Man Ray and Jean Painlevé flitted by in the credits) mixed with the filmmakers own contemporary images of sea and shore. The result is a distillation of images, however different their origins are, edited into one particular story/place, to become an entirely new, singular story/place. The ease with which so many elements were compacted, and the fact that the film’s form wasn’t immediately transparent, reminded that film is nothing more than a reflection of an imaginary world, breaking down the pictures and expectations of the viewer and presenting them as a complete whole to any desired end-- a burden whose importance and impact should always be considered.
3. All social issues are cinematic issues. IMO, the new work of cinema is to promote cultural conversation. There is a growing need to bridge the silos of media we have all become, to foster shared experience, discussion, and culture(s). Cinema is an imitation of life that increasingly feels more real than real life, and no one should take this responsibility lightly.
Noir-BLUE - Displacements of a Dance (dir. Ana Pi/France, Brazil/2018)
This film contains everything I dislike in a film: slow-motion, blurry street lights, dance, personal voice over and more. But, somehow, the precise editing and purpose behind these elements caused them to ease into the sublime and shake off the artificiality of these tired tropes. A young woman living between Brazil and Paris travels to various African countries, hazily charting her lineage but ultimately unraveling the very notion of lineage, concluding that each human being is one. This film also did something that many documentary shorts did at Oberhausen this year as the filmmaker communicated directly with those in front of her camera, at one point even leaving the camera on a tripod to dance alongside her subjects, adding herself to her subject with ease. This interrupted observational approach heralds a new lack of boundaries in nonfiction film that confronts its unnatural nature, attempts to skirt the conflicts/objectification in ethnographic film and-- especially in the case of Noir-BLUE-- exposes all boundaries as superficial. Cinema has no borders, it can be a place of freedom, a place for memory to fade into the birth of a future. NoirBLUE is a revelatory, revolutionary film full of power even in its most quiet, delicate moments and movements.
Syndrome I/O (dirs. Art Union Marmalade/Russia/2018)
An angry Russian teen stomps wordlessly through rooms and streets, his girlfriend dragged beside him. The film relies on the actions-- the punching movement through obscured spaces-- to paint a sense of the emotional rage percolating in an entire generation of anxious, violent, unmoored youth. At one point, the film steps backward, revealing a classroom watching the same film, a character emerges into the room, dragging his girlfriend out to a stunned audience. This moment in which all walls cease to exist vibrated with the energy of a Chris Burden performance: no one moved to stop the boy as he entered, baseball bat in hand, moving through the rows of audience members blankly staring ahead, somehow implicating them in the violence and gently holding them accountable for the behaviors depicted on-screen. The film was made by a collective of recent graduates from a film school in St. Petersburg, a striking vision from the next generation of filmmakers so often embraced by Oberhausen.
Leaving the city on a (punctual) German train I coincidentally sat next to one of the members of the Oberhausen selection committee. Before he exited I thanked him for the festival and he said “I was dreaming.” I was unsure if he meant on the train or for the last six days. Thank you Oberhausen 2019 for the dreams-- past, present and future.
posted by Donna K. at
4:34 PM
