56th Oberhausen Short Film Festival

Taking viewers back to the vaudevillian dawn of cinema, the 56th edition of the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival was reflective and historiographical in intent, but light-hearted and genial in spirit. The main themed programme was titled ‘From The Deep: The Great Experiment 1898–1918’, an impressive collection of around a hundred short films from the dawn of cinema; there was also an interesting programme of No Wave films from the late 1970s and early ’80s co-organized with the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna. For all their obvious differences, the works in both programmes belonged to now-vanished audiences – as one commentator in the catalogue noted, these films ‘were not meant for our eyes’. Other presentations were, of course, very much designed for our viewing: there was the usual competition programme, children’s cinema, music videos, performances and brow-wrinklingly obtuse forums.

La Chenille de la carotte (1911)

‘From the Deep’ included a coruscating mix of terse melodramas, ribald comedy, social documentaries and newsreels, many of which have not been seen for nearly a century. Although this was supposedly a cinema ‘without stars’, my favourite performance was Little Tich (1908), by the brilliantly talented English music-hall actor Harry Relph, whose costume-based routine concluded with the actor donning a pair of massively elongated shoes that enabled him to bow to the (theatre/cinema) audience at an impressively oblique 45-degree angle. One might expect films of this era to be stultifying, but there was bawdiness aplenty in La Confession (The Confession, 1905), a confession featuring a lecherous priest, and the inexplicably surreal Italian comedy Duello allo Shrapnel (Shrapnel Duel, 1913), which featured two men with phallic bombs attached to their backs duelling with hammers. Many of these films were also unexpectedly colourful. Although recorded in black and white, they were frequently hand-tinted, colourised and stencilled in simple hues that accentuated the principle subject matter: glowing red hell-fires, lurid green caterpillars, blue and green seas.

Yael Bartana

The curators sensibly decided to accompany these screenings with a live musical score (music covers up the audience’s coughs and snores, adds bounce to musical routines and pace to dramas). Unfortunately the live soundtrack provided by pianist Donald Sosin was frequently intrusive, distracting and unbearably gimmicky. When, in Dog Outwits the Kidnappers (1908), a dog (silently) barked on screen, Sosin added his own yelping noises; when in the ‘Labour Day’ screening, the hammers of early-20th-century industry came crashing down, Sosin added his own ‘ironic’ electronic keyboard noises; and when, in each screening, the screen darkened between films the pianist keep on playing, just to remind us of his presence. Some audience members laughed on cue. But those who attended more than one of the screenings were worn down by the gimmicks – and could be heard grunting in discontent and complaining loudly in the foyer afterwards.

John Smith, Flag Mountain (2010)

In the competitions, the overall winner was Magnus Bärtås’ Madame & Little Boy (2009). Based on the story of the Korean actress Choi Eun-Hee and film director Shin Sang-Ok, who were kidnapped and taken to North Korea in 1978 where they were forced to make films for Kim Jong-il, Bärtås states that his film ‘takes a standpoint against […] common documentary practice’. The narrative is, apparently, courtesy of the musician Will Oldham. I unfortunately missed Bärtås’ work, but I did enjoy two other prize-winning pieces. John Smith’s Flag Mountain (2010) is a virtuoso HD video showing the Cypriot borderland from across the rooftops of Nicosia. Surprisingly for Smith, whose films and videos are usually thick with jocose winks and nudges, Flag Mountain sidestepped any humorous dénouement: we see a hillside on which a large Northern Cyprus flag has been mapped out; day turns to night and the flag is variously illuminated by the sun and electric lights.

Laure Prouvost, Monolog (2009)

Laure Prouvost’s Monolog (2009) was a witty direct address to the audience. Opening with a simple torso shot of the artist, Prouvost wishes aloud that the cinema screen could be bigger, so we (the audience) might see her head towering above us. She also encouraged us to light up a cigarette, if we wanted: if the cinema staff were to complain, we should ‘tell them I said it would be OK’.

Gunvor Nelson, Schmeerguntz (1966)

As is inevitable in a film festival, I missed several interesting presentations. Most frustratingly, I saw only part of the No Wave programme with works by Vivienne Dick, David Wojnarowicz, Beth and Scott B, James Narres and others denizens Manhattan’s gritty Lower East Side scene. (If you’ve got a thirst for the nihilistic fringe of the post-punk scene, a selection of Dick’s work is available from the Lux). I caught the first of two screenings of works by the Swedish filmmaker Gunvor Nelson, whose work was both more and less than I’d hoped for: Schmeerguntz (1966), made with Dorothy Wiley, was a brilliantly abrasive film featuring images taken from women’s lifestyle magazines contrasted with footage of a heavily pregnant woman bathing, shit bobbing in a toilet and a woman vomiting. Nelson’s most famous film is Take Off (1972), in which a woman performs a strip tease – and, once naked, continues to strip off her body parts, cheerily removing legs, breasts, arms and head. Nelson’s more recent work, however, lacked this wit and relied instead on her formidable editing skills.

As a welcome respite to all this screen-time, I attended a couple of performances at the Festival Bar. Heinz Emigholz’s Sentimental Bombast – Some Panels from the Basis of Make-Up (2010) was a participatory event in which the artist told stories based on a projected series of images that the audience could choose between with the aid of laser pointers. The drawing came from the artist–raconteur’s archive, and featured magical-realist street scenes from 1970s New York, dream sequences and elements copied from television adverts. In Grace Schwindt’s performance Counterpoint Chapter 08 – Architecture (2010), the artist and an assistant read from an interview that Schwindt had conducted with an unnamed German migrant now living in New York. Her concern was to address the sense of history amongst a diverse group of people who ‘did not have ownership of history’ (as, she states, professional historians might be said to have). However, although the text seemed fascinating, the performance felt simply too distant from its source to really get any grasp of. These works were nevertheless a welcome expansion of the notion of the cinema evident in Oberhausen, which – for all its radical commitment – remains firmly committed to the darkened screening room.