By Dan Kidner
Still from '5m 80' (2012) by Nicolas Deveaux, part of the themed section at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival
On my way back from this year’s Oberhausen Short Film Festival – a week-long festival of experimental and artist-made films, and the world’s oldest short film festival – I read an article online about Microsoft’s new ‘augmented reality’ headset, the HoloLens. Rather than create a fully immersive virtual environment the HoloLens augments one’s immediate environment with stereoscopic (3D) images. The promotional video for the device gushes that this blending of the digital world and the ‘real world’ will take users ‘beyond the screen’. Interestingly, beyond the screen there seem to be yet more screens: users in the video are shown working, and watching movies, on virtual flat screens that can be moved and resized within one’s digitally enhanced home or workspace. Despite its name, the HoloLens does not create true holography; it still depends on stereoscopy to create the illusion of depth. Whether the HoloLens will be adopted, or suffer the same fate as Google Glass, remains to be seen. What is clear is that augmented reality is likely to change the way we work with and consume images, or at least offer one more digital platform from which to do so.
The limits and uses of stereoscopy were on my mind after spending several days watching, for the most part, rather pedestrian 3D films, brought together in this year’s themed programme at Oberhausen entitled ‘The Third Image – 3D Cinema as Experiment’. Curated by filmmaker Björn Speidel, the programme surveyed mostly recent films that exploit aspects of stereoscopic image-making technologies. As such it felt at times like visiting a visual effects conference or trade fair rather than a film festival. In Nicolas Deveaux’s 5m 80 (2012), a succession of animated CGI giraffes are shown jumping from a diving board into a swimming pool. Aurora Borealis 3D (2015), a film by ‘holographer’ Nakamura Ikuo, depicts the Northern Lights accompanied by a sweeping orchestral score, and wouldn’t have been out of place in a planetarium. Here, though, it felt misplaced and its corny portentousness even induced hysterical laughter in the late-night audience. Ora (2011) by Philippe Baylaucq captured the choreography of dancer and choreographer José Navas using ‘3D thermal imaging’ – apparently the first film to do this. Ora was also one of a number of films in the programme to feature gratuitous shots of the female form ¬– especially notable in light of the dearth of work by women in the programme, an omission acknowledged by Speidel in his catalogue text: ‘Where are the female filmmakers?’ he asked rhetorically, without providing an answer.
Lucy Raven, ‘Curtains’ (2014)
Within a programme that privileged invention and technical mastery over critical enquiry, there were just a few works of historical experimental film and even fewer works by contemporary artists. The latter category featured Sebastian Buerkner’s The Chimera of M. (2013) and a recent film installation by Lucy Raven, Curtains (2014). Shown as a standalone work in one of the smaller screens at Oberhausen, Curtains was able to retain some critical distance from other works in the main programme. The work consisted of 3D still photographs of office spaces of post-production houses that deal with outsourced 2D to 3D transfer work for Hollywood studios. Over the course of 50 minutes, the separated red and blue plates of different photographs are introduced to the screen, scrolling slowly from left to right and right to left, meaning that for one second, as the plates meet and overlap, the patient viewer is rewarded with a fleeting stereoscopic image. In respect to the programme as a whole, Raven’s work was rare in that it fulfilled the requirement of actual stereoscopy whilst also maintaining a dialogue with works of experimental film concerned with vision and perception, such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) or Hollis Frampton’s _ (1971), as well as more recent film and photographic projects that examine the types of alienated labour produced by global capitalism, such as Noël Burch and Allan Sekula’s _The Forgotten Space (2010).
Nakamura Ikuo, Aurora Borealis 3D, 2015
Representing the history of experimental film were early pioneers Mary-Ellen Bute and Norman McClaren, and ‘structural’ filmmakers Paul Sharits and Ken Jacobs. Bute’s presence was especially significant given her status as one of the first experimental women filmmakers and her role in setting up the Women’s Independent Film Exchange. Two films by Jacobs were included – Opening the 19th Century: 1896 (1990) and Capitalism: Child Labor (2006) – but if it hadn’t have been for the enforcement of the strict organizing principle of actual stereoscopy, then earlier – arguably more interesting – work from the filmmaker on the theme of perspective might have been included. The same could be said of Sharits, who was represented by the only stereoscopic film he made, the rarely screened and recently restored 3D-Movie (1975). It was fantastic to see it, but more for its scarcity than anything else.
Peter Greenaway, 3×3D, 2013
One film that examined the nature of perspective in the cinema from a more historical and philosophical position was Jean-Luc Godard’s The Three Disasters (2012). Using mostly found footage, Godard meditates on the deceitfulness of perspective in cinema per se, and mournfully intones in a mumbling voiceover, ‘truth is loved so much that even liars want what they say to be true.’ The work is actually part of the film 3×3D, commissioned by the Portuguese city of Guimarães to mark its celebrations as European Capital of Culture, which include sections directed by Peter Greenaway and Edgar Pêra, whose contributions fall somewhat short of Godard’s critical tour de force. Thinking critically about issues such as depicting space in film and video, and the myth that innovation in moving image production technologies will bring the viewer more ‘real’ representations of the world was left to a number of quality films spread through the rest of the festivals many profile programmes, competition strands, archive presentations and distributor selections.
Zhou Tao, Blue and Red, 2014
In Laure Prouvost’s We Know We Are Just Pixels (2014), showing in the international competition, digital images ruminate on becoming conscious and breaking through the screen, whilst distributor EAI screened Jacolby Satterwhite’s The Country Ball (1989–2012), which was made by feeding his mother’s drawings of cakes and home videos into 3D animation programme. There were also many films that explored the relation of technology to shifting social relations: Zhou Tao’s Blue and Red (2014) brought together scenes of crowds bathed in the light omitted from LED billboards in the city squares of Guangzhou and in Bangkok to form a composite city teetering on the edge of unrest; and in Beirut Exploded View (2014), screening in the international programme, Akram Zaatari created a world using architectural fragments on the edge of some scrubland in Beirut where social relations are mediated by mobile phones. These films and a number of others across the programmes, thought differently, and in a nuanced way, about the production of the illusion of space in film and video. But on the whole, this year’s Oberhausen offered slim pickings for those wanting to think critically about new image making technologies and their application.