At this year’s International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, two pictures are clearly related, while at the same time they keep their distance from one another. In the following, I will be calling them pictures, although what this is really about is a chain of short cinematic works in the programs. Stringing together short films creates montages of heterogeneous elements as well as continuative figures of thought that are linked to, but also go beyond, the films, themselves thoughts in the form of images and sound in movement and in time. I will take a close look at two short films, as it were as placeholders for these images, since they can be regarded as anchors for the two special programs in Oberhausen – »Whose History?« and »Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers.« The relationship between these two pictures shows a friction, a conflict and a dispute about what could, under the present circumstances, be a policy of images.

In one picture, there is a sort of stage, several microphone stands, a column in the foreground, a draped piece of cloth in the background. Several people walk across this scene, singly, they walk back and forth, position themselves and the stands, form smaller constellations or a larger group. Sometimes they get in each other’s way; once, just for a moment, they manage a constellation that shows the entire group, where everyone has his own position and is visible. The community shown is fragile, it takes shape and dissolves; at the same time, the relations hint at an existing community that preceded the scenes. Missing microphones point at the moment before speaking, before singing, as if the real action were about to take place after the film. After the screening, Emily Roysdon, whose film »Social Movement« is shown as part of Ian White’s program »Whose History?«, speaks of a non-event. The joint social and political action the title promises appears to be missing here, as reflected for example in the microphone stands’ constant new choreography. Society’s movement remains an announcement – but then again, maybe it has already happened.

The other picture shows us a noisy crowd of thousands of women in Tehran. They take to the streets in 1979 to fight for economic and social equality for women, resisting the newly introduced law making it a duty to wear the chador. They talk about feeling betrayed; they say they also fought for the revolution and now laws are being introduced that negate their equality. They say they have lost their fear, as they, too, fought and were in danger during the revolution. One woman says that this demonstration of anger is not only about being opposed to the chador, but that yes, that item of clothing is a hindrance in everyday tasks; it can only be a patriarchal instrument. This second picture is part of a program put together by Madeleine Bernsdorf that develops along the lines of re-appropriation gestures of streets and public spaces. It is one of the programs that forms part of Sherry Millner und Ernest Larsen’s curatorial project »Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers.«

An anchoring point in the first picture thus shows a kind of activist community as what is not happening in the picture as well as the possibility of something happening before or outside the given frame. If the joint movement does briefly enter the picture, then it does so as a transient, seemingly coincidental actualization of this possibility in a felicitous constellation that is however not an action, but rather a passive state of becoming a picture. This picture also presents the »we« that appears before us as a fragile »we« in motion, and the group that thus evolves does not reveal its common codes, relations and aims. »Social Movement« is at the same time a fragment of a program in which the materials and their inherent aesthetic decisions meet as utterly heterogeneous elements, albeit in an indifferent manner. As a result, Roysdon’s short film becomes a document, for example, of mineworkers’ wives who in the early 1970s reflect upon their own role in relation to the strikes and thus to the fictive and real (self-)dramatization of »Mrs. Blackburn« by Alexander Kluge. Further along in the program, we find Kluge/Schamoni’s interrogation of violence shaped in stone, at the same time a fragment with regard to Nazi architecture; a work by Stephen Prina, who combines historic paintings with a musical performance in a museum, himself performing in a red overall; or a work by Emily Wardill, who stages a psychic model of broken relationships by referencing colorful, fragmented church windows, as artificial as it is funny in a prim way. This enumeration alone shows that White’s program does not embark on a quest for »correct« history, but instead poses questions to the production and performance of the (past) present as history itself. White questions how history is constituted in relation to the present by taking the discussion of the production that has just been seen as his starting point for jointly reflecting on the present based on the specific way in which history/stories are drafted.

The other picture’s anchor point shows a group caught up in the power of the moment, when coming together in a joint battle appears to be as necessary as it is self-evident. I believe this second picture returns from the past as an ideal vision for the present; this is where it unfolds its potential. Before that, in the same program, women (and men dressed as women) run though streets, apartments and bars, rushing, falling and rolling toward a police station while waving signs that read »Down with the bosses« und »Long live the strike.« The same program also shows an unedited documentary of the seizure of posters before the last election in Germany in 1929, a film that recalls the emptiness and the organized marches in those same streets as a threatening image; in »Blitzkrieg« (2007) choreographies trace the revolt on May 1 in Kreuzberg; a further work shows group pictures of men in white shirts and black trousers in a small town, persecuting an individual with shouts and revolutionary pathos and then ending up stretched out on the ground; and finally a film by René Vautier, who in 1950 vehemently criticized the situation in the French colonies in Africa. A configuration of protests and their cinematic staging is thus evident here. In this case as well, a history is traced that in view of the material available puts a question to the present.

One might say that the first picture is searching for the crystallization of stories/history in forms of artificiality, staged and not authentic, returning again and again to the issue of the medium and the context, while all along it never loses sight of the issue of the (im)possible communities thus created. The other picture presents itself as the will toward a (at times fictive) document of a certain mood, toward action, toward making visible the moment at which a rent occurs in the texture of society’s reality, a dissent, a possible dislocation. Sometimes, these two movements can cross paths; the one picture might be evident in the other. Often, however, the two pictures maintain a distance from one another, with one picture designing new configurations of seeing, speaking and maybe doing with its open, indecisive coincidences. It points out something that Godard once said: it is not important to make political films, but to make films political. That is what the picture indicates, asking what the possible means (cinematic, artistic) could be. The other picture, however – I mean the programs compiled by Millner and Larsen – is frozen in the defiant gesture of, in the name of political activism, making anything political look foolish. It sometimes appears frozen in the past, even as it is trying to get in touch with the present. What becomes clear here is that the representation of the political is by no means the political itself; rather, it is necessary to ascertain the difficult relationship between politics and aesthetics. We not only have to ask who is speaking, when and from where, but also what questions the medium itself raises and can raise as a challenge to the given relations in a society and to its production process as well as the respective forms of the aesthetic.

 

Translated by Dagmar Breitenbach, Jennifer Taylor

 

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