By Vivian Sky Rehberg
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Film still from Nathaniel Mellors, "The Saprophage" (2012) at the IFFR 2013
When I moved from Paris to Rotterdam last February, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) was in full swing and I completely missed it, so I was determined to make up for lost time this year by squeezing in as many screenings as I could. For two weeks each dreary Dutch winter, the film festival takes over the blustery port city. The De Doelen concert hall becomes the main hub for the industry’s artistic and economic business of producing, distributing, financing and launching films, while cinemas and art spaces all over town hum with screenings, panel discussions, exhibitions, Q&As and of course, parties, from morning to night.
The programme is announced well in advance, so one can gain a decent overview of the feature-length to short, art-house to mainstream cinema that will be on offer, and films are categorized into sections and sub-sections. In theory, one could, for example, choose to only attend European and World Premieres, or just the films in competition for one of the awards schemes, or films by directors from one of the focus countries (this year Iran). In practice, targeted choices are difficult to make since the programme timetable is only available one week prior to the opening, and tickets for public screenings tend to go like hotcakes the minute online booking starts. Over and over again veteran festival-goers told me I should just leave my viewing up to fate.
Since I only had one weekend I could devote to the IFFR and was a total film-festival neophyte, I decided to call upon the expert advice of Rotterdam-based film programmer Peter Taylor and artist Maaike Gouwenberg, both of whom were members of the editorial committee for this year’s ‘Spectrum Shorts’ section of the festival. One of the hallmarks of the IFFR is the attention it grants to short films. They have their own competition, ‘The Canon Tiger Awards, ’and this year Beatrice Gibson, Zachary Formwalt and Rotterdam’s own Erik van Lieshout – for his film Janus (2012), filmed in South Rotterdam where Van Lieshout has a studio – shared the prize.
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Erik van Lieshout, “Janus” (2012)
A separate section, the ‘Spectrum Shorts’ was comprised of themed compilation programmes with titles like ‘Hauntological Futures’, ‘F for Fake’, ‘Looking Glass Self’, or ‘Close Encounters: Peripheral Images and Histories of the Present’ (with a focus on the Middle East, compiled by Omar Kholeif, curator of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool, and IFFR programmer Peter Van Hoof). According to Gouwenberg, the Spectrum Shorts editorial committee received over 3,000 entries and culled the selection to a manageable 199 by dividing the films between the programmers according to geographical region.
Not only did some of the programme themes resonate strongly with trends in contemporary art and curatorial practice, there were a striking number of films by contemporary artists in the selection as a whole, many of which were produced by contemporary art platforms or had already been screened in exhibition contexts. This naturally raised questions in both formal post-screening discussions and in casual conversation about the position of the ‘artist’ vis-à-vis that of the film ‘director’. It also led to comparisons between the exhibition and the cinema as screening environments for artists’ films, and commentaries about the passive cinema viewer versus active exhibition spectator. I hold no illusions that the cinema is a neutral space, and I don’t know if it was the linearity of the temporal experience and sedentary nature of the spatial one, or the stable frame of the screen and beam of the projector, but it felt like an utter luxury to be able to sit and focus on the images and sounds materializing before me without the discursive or contextual interference of an exhibition.
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The Otolith Group, “The Radiant” (2012)
Watching films back to back for two straight days helped me formulate connections I had not made previously between the Otolith Group’s The Radiant (2012) and Canon Tiger Award nominee Willie Doherty’s Secretion (2012), both of which were commissioned for dOCUMENTA (13) last year. The Radiant documents Japan’s relationship to nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, while Secretion examines the toxic remnants of the Holocaust in Germany. Doherty’s narrator uses a neutral, technocratic language that is as ripe with innuendo as the mildew-blossomed walls and dewy mushroom caps he shoots close-up. His language is akin to some of the documentary-speak the Otolith Group alternates with more anecdotal witness accounts. The ambiguity of language along with the potential unreliability of evidence emerge as powerful elements of both films. Although vastly different in their visual approaches, they both situate the viewer in the timeframe of the aftermath while considering the seepage and ramifications of human and ecological catastrophes on geographical, geological and cellular levels. With their focus on the visible and the invisible effects of disaster, and so on trauma, it seemed to me they signalled a potential, fertile and critical revitalization of the age-old landscape genre, and a welcome one at that.
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Willie Doherty, “Secretion” (2012)
Canon Tiger Award nominee Kerry Tribe’s Greystone (2012) and John Menick’s Starring Sigmund Freud (2012), amongst others, attested that the appropriation of dialogue, use of visual fragments or locations from the history of cinema are full-fledged commonplace strategies in artists’ films. Then there are those films crafted from hours spent googling footage to string together, which I recognize is part and partial of the digital revolution, but which I find tedious to watch, probably because I spend far too much time on the Internet already. Constant Dullaart is a deserved stand-out for his work with the internet as medium, but his Crystal Pillars (2013), a heavy-handed, sickly-voiced-over short about the narrator’s fraught relationship to facebook won my award for most irritating film. Please no more films, texts or art works about how facebook ruined your relationships? In the same compilation programme, ‘Present Tense’, I much preferred Katarina Zdjelar’s moving postcolonial portrait of musicians from the National Symphony Orchestra in Ghana (My Lifetime [Malaika], 2012) and Nathaniel Mellors’s jauntily schizoid trip to the ‘permanent present’ (The Saprophage, 2012), which was shot entirely on an iPhone.
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Katarina Zdjelar, “My Lifetime (Malaika)” (2012)
The interaction and intersection between contemporary art and the film industry extended beyond the cinema and into art spaces like TENT, which featured Mika Taanila’s three-channel video installation The Most Electrified Town in Finland (2004–12); Printroom, which hosted Jason Simon’s publication and stills from Festschrift for an Archive along with Martha Colburn’s animation Spin and a flipbook collection; and WORM, our local ‘Institute for Avant-Garde Recreation’, which mounted ‘Mind the Gap Nights’, with audio-visual performances for late-night revellers.
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Michael Snow, “Slidelength” (1971)
But the most stimulating interaction and intersection, for me, took place in a session conceived by Edwin Carels, titled ‘Single Frame Snow’, which was devoted to Michael Snow’s early work. Snow was an active participant in this year’s festival – as was Tony Conrad – and both were present and approachable. ‘Single Frame Snow’ included A Casing Shelved (1970), a fixed shot of a shelf whose contents are meticulously described by Snow for 45 minutes; Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film (1970), a film of slides of Snow’s paintings; and Slidelength (1971). Snow operated the slide projectors for Slidelength himself, deciding on the spur of the moment to break with the conventional 15-second intervals between the different, occasionally obscure images simply in order to watch each slide for as long as he wanted to. In the post-screening conversation with Carels, Snow described this as a ‘performance variation’, and one couldn’t help but sense that something unique and perhaps even historic had just taken place. In fact, something else Snow said about his work pretty much sums up my experience, albeit limited, of the IFFR: ‘A certain amount of attention can be rewarding.’
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