The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2020
And the Shortcomings and Benefits of a Virtual Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Jared Rapfogel

It goes without saying that the sixty-sixth edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen was anything but business as usual. Taking place from May 13–18, 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s festival was an online affair, and there’s no way to discuss the event without this radical format taking center stage. Though not the very first film festival in the Coronavirus era to shift into the virtual realm (earlier instances included CPH:DOX and the Ann Arbor Film Festival), Oberhausen was certainly in the first wave, which is to say that planning for the festival was far advanced when disaster struck. The first thing to report, then, is that the festival was a great success from a logistical and technical standpoint, a feat of frenzied, high-pressure arrangements that must have led to many sleepless nights. True, the launch of the festival on the evening of May 13 was marked by an immediate server meltdown. But that momentary glitch was addressed quickly, and apparently was triggered by much higher demand than the festival anticipated, a sign of what was reportedly an unhoped-for success on the level of viewership as well.

There are so many things to say about the festival’s virtual manifestation. Best perhaps to begin by painting a picture of the experience: though some parts of the planned programming had to be jettisoned, the majority of the programs were able to make the move online. The basic structure of the festival—with its various sections including the International, German, and other Competitions, the Profiles showcasing individual artists, the Archives screenings focusing on particular institutions’ collections, the Distributor component wherein short film distributors ply their wares, and so on and so forth—remained intact. Each program was made available for forty-eight hours—a perfect period, providing plenty of time to design one’s own schedule but short enough to give each day the flavor of a special event. Most of the programs featured an introduction from the filmmaker or curator, while each film in the Competition programs was followed by a prerecorded Q&A between the filmmaker and a member of the selection committee. Live Q&As took place as well, conducted via video-chat, with daily Zoom meetings offering the opportunity to meet members of the festival’s staff (the festival director, Lars Henrik Gass, members of the press office or selection committees, other curators, and so on). 

Of course the transition to a radical new way of organizing and presenting a film festival begs the question, what was lost and what was gained? In terms of engaging with the festival lineup, I have to say that there was something liberating about accessing the programs online. Free of the “distractions” of socializing with fellow filmgoers, programmers, curators, and writers, of the temptation to skip programs in favor of visits to the festival café or the nightly parties, I ended up watching significantly more of the festival’s programs than usual. Furthermore, experiencing the festival in the absence of jet lag—a factor that can make it very difficult to stay alert (or even entirely conscious) while running the gauntlet of nonstop moviegoing—was something new under the sun. The opportunity to pause between films to take immediate notes or simply to reflect felt like a luxury that benefitted both the festivalgoer and the filmmakers, insofar as it prevented the films from blurring into each other.

On the other hand, the social dimension is much more than simply a distraction, it’s a crucial part of what makes festivals important and valuable. More than films are shared at a festival, especially one like Oberhausen that draws a particular international community of devotees of short and experimental cinema. Oberhausen serves as an occasion to share ideas and to meet filmmakers and colleagues. Even more than that, for those who travel to Oberhausen from outside Germany, or outside Europe, the festival represents an opportunity to step outside of our normal routines and work environments, and not only make professional connections but think in new ways that only different cultures and different contexts can inspire.

For an individual, then, there was an element of the festival that was sadly missing. On the other hand, travelling around the world to attend film festivals is a luxury that’s open only to a highly fortunate few. It can certainly be argued that, weighed in the balance, the increased ability for viewers across the world to engage with the festival and its films is more important than the opportunity for a much smaller, more privileged collection of people to gather in person. In a larger sense, part of what makes this period so extraordinary, and potentially so transformative, is the ways in which it’s forcing institutions and systems to reconfigure themselves (or, considering the protests and actions calling for racial justice—actions that may not have been so widespread, energetic, and effective without the unique climate and context of the global pandemic—to rethink some of the most ingrained ways our societies function, or fail to function). And hopefully some of these reconfigurations may result in valuable and lasting changes. In any case, it seems clear that some of the lessons learned during the online, pandemic edition of Oberhausen, and some of the new systems that made it possible for the festival to go forward and reach much broader audiences, may well be important tools for expanding the festival, even once the in-person event returns. 

Speaking of reconfiguring systems and identifying and combating privilege, a number of films in various sections of this year’s festival spoke precisely to these issues, perhaps none with as much wit as Thirza Cuthand’s Less Lethal Fetishes (Canada, 2019), which screened in the Distributors screening co-organized by the Canadian organization Vtape. Cuthand’s film revolves around the scandal that erupted during the 2019 Whitney Biennial concerning Warren B. Kanders, a co-chair of the Whitney Museum’s board whose company Safariland manufactures tear gas grenades. A movement emerged encouraging Biennial artists to withdraw from the exhibition in order to force the removal of Kanders. Directly addressing the viewer, Cuthand explores the ramifications of this well-meaning (and ultimately successful) initiative from the perspective of a queer artist of partly indigenous (Plains Cree) descent, and more specifically through the lens of her strangely rich history of interaction with gas masks (she’s used them in her work in the past, and hilariously teases out her heretofore unexamined relationship to them as fetish objects). Less Lethal Fetishes is an ostensibly offhand and comical piece (it unquestionably features the most memorable final line of any of the festival’s works: “I kinda miss the horny joy of watching that woman wearing a gas mask while in bondage lower herself to the floor for her top. It was a simpler time, at least for me.”). But under cover of its playful and self-deprecatory tone, Less Lethal Fetishes zeroes in on the complexities and unexamined dimensions of class privilege that suffuse even such high-minded protests as the one that convulsed the Biennial. In particular, the movement to oust Kanders put already disempowered and marginalized artists like Cuthand in the untenable position of feeling obligated to support the protest by potentially sacrificing the biggest break they had ever achieved in the art world. Cuthand deftly calls attention to the relative privilege and entitlement of those artists who could afford (financially and/or professionally) to withdraw their work. 

Vika Kirchenbauer’s Untitled Sequence of Gaps (Germany, 2020), part of the Distributors program curated by Arsenal in Berlin, addresses questions of invisibility—of realms of experience and identity that the dominant culture often literally fails to perceive or recognize—in a more poetic, symbolic register. Composed of a combination of home movie footage, visually striking infrared/ultraviolet photography, pure color panels, and an enigmatic, seemingly fragmentary narration, the film uses the phenomena of unseen forces—namely infrared and ultraviolet light and microwave radiation—as a rich and flexible metaphor. In Kirchenbauer’s hands, these invisible waves evoke the multitude of ways in which our lives and identities—and in particular the lives and identities of those whose sexuality or gender lie outside the boundaries of mainstream mores—are refracted through unseen cultural prisms. The full spectrum of light and radiation stands in for the full spectrum of gender or sexuality, parts of which are almost literally imperceptible or inconceivable to many. It also evokes the phenomenon of repressed memories, or even the legacy of childhood itself, a period of life that generates psychological and emotional structures and ramifications that continue to exert an invisible influence on all of us. And when Kirchenbauer juxtaposes imagery of a microwave oven with the observation that, “It is argued in academic articles that when the microwave oven entered the market, it was somewhat less clearly gendered than other appliances, allowing men to enter the kitchen without appearing gay,” the metaphor takes on yet another dimension, drawing out the coded behaviors and connotations that most people accept without questioning or examining.

The film ends with a section about the only recently banished ritual in Kirchenbauer’s home town of throwing a straw witch on a bonfire to mark the summer solstice. Musing on the town’s decision to stop the practice of burning effigies of women, while allowing the fire and all the other trappings of the ritual to remain, Kirchenbauer asks, “I wonder whether violence decreases once its image is removed, or if it does its work even better, invisibly.” It’s hard to think of a question more germane to the present moment, a time of reckoning with the persistence of deeply entrenched racism and injustice during a supposedly postracial era.

It seemed that everywhere you looked in Oberhausen 2020’s lineup you found films that spoke to (forcibly) vanished peoples and histories, and in many of these instances this phenomenon was seen through the lens of landscapes. The point of departure for Ana Vaz’s Why? (Apiyemiyekî?) (Brazil, 2019)—also part of the Arsenal program—is the work of Brazilian teacher and indigenous rights activist Egydio Schwade, who in the 1980s collaborated closely with the Waimiri–Atroari people of the Brazilian Amazon. The Waimiri–Atroari had earlier been driven nearly to extinction by the Brazilian Army due to the construction of a highway through their land. As part of his project, Schwade encouraged them to create drawings of their lives, their environment and culture, and the history of their conflicts with the Brazilian government. Combining footage of interviews with Schwade and other archival materials with her own footage of the Waimiri–Atroari’s land today, Vaz superimposes the drawings over this present-day landscape photography, a powerful filmic gesture that, in a sense, inserts them back into their land, cinematically reversing the process by which Brazil tried to erase them from the landscape (a gesture that is enormously moving but of course also profoundly poignant in its ultimate futility).

A different, less violent, but still insidious form of exclusion suffuses Dawn Wilkinson’s Dandelions (Canada, 1995), which screened as part of the Distributors program drawn from the catalogue of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC). And once again this (racial) exclusion is expressed largely through images of the (coded) landscape. Here the landscapes are those of Ontario, where Wilkinson—a black Canadian woman—grew up. Visually and structurally, Dandelions is squarely within a certain tradition of impressionistic experimental cinema, its fragmentary, highly textured hand-processed imagery juxtaposed with poetic on-screen text. But thematically it stands apart, bearing witness with great candor and penetrating intelligence to the experience of being made to feel like an outsider in one’s own home, in one’s own landscape. At one point, Wilkinson observes, “I’m Canadian…It’s popular enough to sell beer, but no one can define what it means. And yet they do, they define it every time they ask me where I’m from.” Dandelions is a beautiful and eloquent film that deploys the techniques of a lyrical, interiorized cinema to lay bare the ways in which Western societies foster an (internalized, unexamined) idea of normalcy—of whiteness as “neutral” and everything else as “other”—and to illustrate the psychic toll on those who exist outside this construct. It’s a highly personal testament, but at the very end Wilkinson elegantly widens the frame by turning the camera on a mirror, effectively drawing the viewer into the film, and prodding us to consider our own identities, perceptions, and judgments.

One facet of Dandelions is Wilkinson’s frustration with the limits of communication, with the difficulty of truly conveying her own experience in the world and in Canadian society. One of the most thought-provoking and enigmatic films in the International Competition, Jenny Brady’s Receiver (Ireland, 2019) is a meditation on this very subject, on communication and miscommunication, through the prism not of race but of deafness. Structured in five parts, Receiver is a collage film bringing together disparate materials: audio of an AT&T customer call during which a crossed connection escalates into verbal abuse; a debate about the leadership of a university for the deaf; a legally deaf video artist describing her experience of hearing her own and others’ voices; footage of a Q&A following a screening of Orson Welles’s The Trial, which is plagued by recording snafus and miscommunications; and finally Brady’s own footage of a BBC Radiophonic Workshop for deaf children. Receiver is an exceptional example of “intellectual montage”—its extraordinary conceptual richness is a function of its refusal to connect the dots between each of its discrete segments. Instead, it simply gathers these seemingly disparate materials together, and gives the viewer the intellectual space to draw connections based on their proximity. What emerges is both a profoundly intriguing investigation into the role of sound in communication and an exploration of the nature of communication itself—the many different forms it can take, the ways certain forms can come to dominate and be perceived as “normal,” and, above all, the ways communication can break down.

The challenge of communication is at the very heart of Barbara Hammer’s classic video work, Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape (USA, 1985), which was included as part of Electronic Arts Intermix’s Distributors screening. For this “Art on the Subway” commission, Hammer interviewed unsuspecting straphangers about their experiences of the subway, and encouraged various riders to break the unspoken vow of subway privacy and engage in conversation with their neighbors. The result is enormously entertaining, as men, women, and children speak to each other across normally invisible but rarely broached divides of race, culture, and class (with varying degrees of comfort). The whole video operates on the knife’s edge of joy and excruciating awkwardness. From today’s perspective it’s a joy to behold if only for its glimpses into the daily lives, fashions, and gestures of 1980s New Yorkers. But not far below the surface is a fascinating exploration of shared urban space, and of the invisible but complicated dynamics of personal and social interaction within these spaces. It also happens to include one of the most unforgettable lines of the festival: when Hammer approaches an attractive but highly guarded young woman and asks what she’s reading, she says simply, “I just got through reading an article about raccoon rabies.”

Two other standout films at the festival represented masterful portraits of place. Chronicling the daily activities in a glass factory on the German/Czech border, Verena Wagner’s keep shiftin’ (schichteln, Germany, 2019), part of the German Competition, takes its place in the rich tradition of films about work. It’s an exemplary instance of the genre, not least of all because Wagner resists the temptation to reduce the men (and at this particular factory, the workers are indeed exclusively male) to anonymous components of a mechanical process and a cinematic spectacle. Wagner makes room for snatches of break-time conversation between the workers, and glimpses of the objects they keep at their station—small filmic gestures that go a long way toward individualizing the workers, and preventing them from becoming mere figures in a landscape. Nevertheless, the heart of the film is the spectacle of the glass blowing process. As Wagner portrays it, it’s hard to decide which is more extraordinary: the elemental physical materials and forces that are involved (glass in its molten and solid forms, but also the metal molds used to shape it, the heat and steam it emanates, the water used for cooling, and the air the workers force into the glass objects by means of hoses or their own lungs), or the intricate, hypnotic gestures and movements the workers employ to manipulate and form the glass. Wagner’s film is one of perpetual motion—the workers have to keep the glass cylinders moving continuously, revolving, swinging, or otherwise agitating them, all of it requiring a mutual coordination that makes the whole process resemble nothing so much as a dance performance. keep shiftin’ is also animated by the palpable contrast between the strenuous activity and heavy machinery involved in the process and the extreme fragility of the final products, a paradox that gives the film a uniquely poetic quality. 

Seem from a certain perspective, Heather Trawick’s Isn’t It a Pity (USA, 2019), screened in the International Competition, is a perfect companion piece to keep shiftin’. Filmed at a small amateur demolition derby, and in particular in the pit where the battered and beaten vehicles are battered and beaten back into serviceable shape by offstage mechanics, Isn’t It a Pity may be culturally far removed from a German glass factory. But in Trawick’s hands, it’s nothing if not a choreographed spectacle of elemental physical materials—a symphony of metal, fire, dust, and mud—and a duel between heavy machinery and objects of profound fragility (in this case, the flesh and blood drivers and mechanics). And like Wagner, Trawick refuses to allow the human figures to be subsumed entirely into the spectacle, devoting parts of the non-sync soundtrack to the conversations and banter between the men and women of the derby (surprisingly, the demolition derby is not the all-male domain that the glass factory is—in fact, Trawick was initially drawn to film the scene thanks to the proliferation of female mechanics).

So far I’ve focused on the contemporary films in Oberhausen’s lineup. Nevertheless, perhaps the two most memorable programs emerged from the archival/historical component of the festival. The always-invaluable Archives section—which showcases the collections and preservation projects of various international film archives—included an extraordinary program presented by the Polish organization, Fundacja Arton, focusing on experimental video artists in Poland in the mid-to-late 1970s. Gathering together ten short video works, the program was illuminating on multiple levels. For one thing, by the evidence of the Oberhausen selection, female artists were central to mid-1970s Polish video art—all ten of the works included in the program were by female makers. And unfamiliar as the films are on these shores, they are very much in dialogue with trends, ideas, and strategies that were prevalent in early video art in North America, Western Europe, Asia, and elsewhere at the time. In particular, like the contemporaneous work of artists such as Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, James Nares, and numerous others, many of these video works comprise small gestures. In some cases, they depict gestures—such as Jolanta Marcolla’s Kiss (1975), which repeats ad infinitum an image of a woman blowing kisses towards the camera (a highly gendered image, but here rendered ambiguous: is it seductive, affectionate, or is it a “kiss off”?). In other cases, the films themselves embody filmic (or videographic) gestures. In Ewa Partum’s TV Drawings (Rysunki telewizyjne, 1976), for instance, Partum uses a marker to draw directly on a TV screen, thereby transforming the psychologically and politically passive act of watching a television newscast into a matter of active engagement. This act places TV Drawings in the tradition of works that directly manipulate or otherwise call attention to the video monitor (by Lynda Benglis, Joan Jonas, Dan Graham, Takahiko Iimura, and a host of others), as well as those films and videos that have aimed to deconstruct or interrogate television newscasts and programming (Richard Serra & Carlotta Fay Schoolman’s Television Delivers People [1973], Anthony Ramos’s About Media [1977], numerous works by Martha Rosler, and so on).

Even more striking were the associations called to mind by Jadwiga Singer’s Destruction (Destrukcja, 1978). A conceptually inspired work, Destruction is (apparently) set in a nondescript interior of a house or apartment. The camera slowly zooms in on a wall of the room, on which is mounted a photo of the room itself. Once the camera has zoomed in so far that the photo fills the frame, the “image” begins to burn, and it becomes clear that there has been an invisible cut: the photo that is burning is not mounted on the wall but rather suspended in the middle of the room, so that as it burns the “real” room is gradually revealed. But as the film comes to an end, smoke begins to rise from below again, suggesting a continuous cycle and begging the question (to be left unanswered) of whether the image we see is in fact another photograph (or if the room itself is on fire!). Destruction is an ingenious, witty, and brain-tickling meditation on the instability of the image and the deceptive nature of filmic space. And for those familiar with the foundational works of American avant-garde cinema, it’s a fascinating Eastern European counterpart to the work of Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow—in fact, it’s almost like the Polish love-child of Frampton’s Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia) (1971) and Snow’s Wavelength (1967).

The other revelatory program—which wasn’t officially part of the Archives section, though it did showcase new restorations produced by the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam—was devoted to the work of Dutch experimental filmmaker Henri Plaat. From the evidence of the seven films presented at Oberhausen, Plaat’s films fall into two broad categories: highly stylized, gleefully campy, and extravagantly performative works, and travelogues constructed from footage gathered during his journeys in far-flung regions of the globe. Most of the films in the selection fell into the first category—these are unmistakably in the tradition of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, with their loving, happily threadbare subversion of Hollywood glamour and the tropes of melodrama, and the use of actors in drag, who perform directly to the camera. Films like The Strange but Unknown Star (1969), Second War Hats (1986), and Laughter in the Rosary! (1973) are masterpieces of the form—shot in almost miraculously vibrant and luminous Kodachrome, they are joyful in their inventiveness and visual beauty, but with an undertone of disturbing mystery. This discordant note is subtly present in The Strange but Unknown Star, with its underage protagonist in her Hollywood diva rubber mask and its fetish for submerging stills of Dietrich and Garbo under a dizzying variety of materials: black lace and water, but escalating to raisins, flour, and raw eggs. It’s more unmistakably a feature of Second War Hats, with its cast of cross-dressing, lavishly made-up and attired models buried up to their necks (à la Beckett) against a backdrop of burning, bombed-out buildings.

At first sight, the travelogues—represented here by Fragments of Decay (1983) and Spurs of Tango (1980)—seem radically distinct from the melodramatic, quasinarrative films. They are reminiscent of the films of Warren Sonbert, both in their structure (constructed of fragments of footage organized visually and rhythmically rather than chronologically or geographically), and in their exquisite compositional beauty and editing patterns. But they do connect to the other films in certain ways. Tonally, Fragments of Decay draws out Plaat’s darker side—it’s a profoundly disturbing, downbeat work, relatively depopulated, with the charismatic actors of the other films replaced by decrepit or crumbling buildings and empty, trash-strewn spaces. Where people do appear, they are generally solitary, in shadows, or lost in thought. But Plaat’s taste for the flamboyant and expressive animates the travelogues as well, even if here it manifests in other ways, especially through the exaggerated, lopsided compositions. In a sense, Plaat finds an equivalence in the travelogue form for the heightened artificiality of his melodramas—he has such a remarkable eye and such an extraordinary command of cinematography that he finds the expressive, sensuous, and even glamorous qualities of his more constructed films in the landscapes he travels through and documents.

Watching travelogues—and more generally speaking, seeing work from and about so many different countries and regions—during a festival rendered “virtual” by a global pandemic was a bittersweet experience. On the other hand, that Oberhausen could go forward at all was a testament to the technological tools available in the twenty-first century, and above all to the tireless efforts and resilient adaptability of the festival’s organizers and curators. Their success in rising to the challenge posed by the pandemic was extraordinary. To my eyes, they not only salvaged the festival, but presented one of its strongest editions in recent memory. 

For further information on the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, visit here.

Jared Rapfogel is the film programmer at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

Copyright © 2020 by Cineaste Magazine 

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