The fourth instalment in the series about rarities or forgotten items from four decades of media culture

»A Different History: 50 years of short film in Oberhausen«. This was the title given to a comprehensive retrospective put on by the oldest short film festival in the world to congratulate itself on its own fiftieth anniversary this year. Founded in 1954 as the »West German Documentary Film Festival«, »Oberhausen« now embraces such a wide spectrum that an orderly overview of the cinematic approaches is barely possible. Reason enough to attempt to subject the prolific production of the past fifty years, and above all, the Festival’s own impressive collection, to a methodical historiography.

The archive as an exclusive mirror to the world as it is depicted year after year at the Festival. Every reflection a curatorial point of view that necessarily leads to distortions. This is how one could interpret the point of departure from which Angela Haardt, who herself directed the Short Film Festival from 1990 to 1997, approached the retrospective. »A Different History« was to take shape here, in all its opulence and heterogeneity (17 overfull programmes with almost 120 individual films), a history that took into account the wide variety of productions made over half a century. However, what stands in the way of the idea of a counter-history is the fact that there has of yet been no standard history of the short film, no triumphant »victor’s history« – except for a few festival prize-winners and popular classics – that has prevailed over its »victims«. In the end, one couldn’t help thinking that the »different« history may itself only have been a place marker for such a master canon, constructed according to very orthodox ideologems.

Haardt maintained that she wanted to highlight the »marginal, the subcultural and proletarian aspects« of short film. Before - rather contradictorily - in the same breath propagating a »high culture of the non-conventional«. Rigid, transhistorical oppositions were to form the theoretical framework for this: THE resistance against THE power, THE nonconformist against THE lie of society, THE sublime against THE pop-cultural decline – right through the decades. This, despite the fact that – as the retrospective itself illustrated – the relationship of films to their political contexts is constantly rearticulated, both situatively and, above all, in an aesthetic, relational sense. The fact that, for example, Haardt’s distinction between works with »extensive energy« (socio-critical protest) and works with »intensive energy« (rescue of the individual) no longer really applies even as early as 1968 is shown by a film like Charles Wilp’s »Hockenheimring«, one of the many finds in the retrospective. Wilp’s planned homage to his racing-driver friend Jim Clark, designed as a celebration of the culture of the spectacle, disintegrates, after Clark’s fatal accident, into a sort of mute accusation. Individual grief that tries to find a last (visual) support in the fragments of the lethal illusion. No distinction can be made between »extensive« and »intensive« in the small masterpiece »Concerto pour un exil« (Desiré Ecaré, 1968) either, in which the subjective sensibilities of migrants from Ivory Coast in Paris inform a socio-critical depiction of conditions of exile.

The lack of more complex discursive embedments was countered by a large number of rediscoveries: for example, Jean Herman’s »Actua Tilt« (1960), in which critique of the spectacle – before the concept was even invented, so to speak – is expressed in effectively compressed montage. Images of progress from the field of space travel are contrasted with scenes in an amusement arcade, where the gaze works its way forward further and further into the many small metaphors of death and destruction. Towards the end, Neil Sedaka’s »One Way Ticket to the Blues« is played, a reference to the functional disorder (tilt) that finally also affects the human machines. The intertwinement of the destructive urge and feelings of hopelessness has seldom been depicted in a more vivid manner.

The fact that resistance is not a fixed, super-temporal quantity was proven by another highlight of the programme: Matsumoto Toshio’s »For My Crushed Right Eye« (1968). This film had its premiere showing in Oberhausen in 1970 as a threefold projection with a concluding stroboscope thunderstorm, and the work was reproduced in exactly the same manner at this year’s festival. In Matsumoto’s film, the overflowing energy of a historical moment, pushing simultaneously outwards and inwards, can no longer be contained by a single screen. Wild dance scenes and the revolts of youth culture are superimposed on contemporary images from politics, advertising, racing and official ceremonies – everything in a never-ending flow. This is film as the expression of political movement, with the consumer culture invested with revolutionary, libidinous traits, while the revolt shows blatant, spectacular characteristics.

The way in which new departures and criticism have become increasingly intertwined after 1968 was shown by numerous other rarities, such as Gunvor Nelson’s »Take Off« (1972). A lascivious striptease sequence is carried to such an absurd stage that the dancer also »takes off« her arms and legs and catapults into space. Here, the dualism of voyeurism and the forbidden seems to dispose of itself. Even long after they were made, films like this still leave the relationship of power and resistance in the balance – in the face of every attempt to pin it down.

http://www.kurzfilmtage.de
To celebrate this year’s anniversary, an interesting reader was published: »kurz und klein – 50 Jahre Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen«. Ed. Klaus Behnken. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2004.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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