By Dan Kidner
Zoran Tadić, Dernek (Country Fair, 1975), film still
This year at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, almost 100 programmes fought for attention. Two stand-out programmes focused on three Croatian filmmakers – Petar Krelja, Krsto Papić and Zoran Tadić – who, working in the late 1960s and early ’70s, became known as the ‘Hitchcockians’. Although not as hard hitting and political as the concurrent Yugoslav movement, the Serbian Black Wave, with whom they share some similarities – such as the refunctioning of cinéma verité techniques to political and social ends – the films nonetheless impressed with their lyricism and sly social criticism.
Luther Price, Home (1999), Super-8 still
Two profiles – of the American Luther Price and German Helga Fanderl – were fascinating to see alongside one another. Both Price and Fanderl, active since the early 1990s, work with 8mm and 16mm, and utilize different strategies to avoid accusations of anachronism. Fanderl favours a kind of look-and-shoot technique that imbues her films with a kind of effortless timelessness, whilst Price emphasizes the fact that he is using a dying medium by applying ‘after-effects’, such as burying his films in the ground, which gives the images an aged patina. He lets them sit there for up to three months before digging them up (apparently leaving them any longer renders the film ‘unprojectable’).
Rachel Reupke, Wine and Spirits (2013)
The fragility of Price’s work forces one to see the works as artefacts and reinforces the event-ness of the screening. In Home (1999), for example, the voices of two women can be heard (one of them is the artist’s mother), but only selected sentences are discernable. These are cut up and looped: ‘That was another guy’s boat…’ ‘Maybe she did maybe she didn’t…’ ‘Maybe I was mistaken about that…’ Whilst these phrases repeat, a snatched refrain from what sounds like a horror film soundtrack also loops. Both soundtracks are quite scratchy, overlapping to build tension. This is periodically broken by a well-defined cough – the artist’s own interruption from the cutting room perhaps? Whatever the source, it abruptly pulls one’s attention from the film to its making.
The main themed programmes this year were curated by London-based curator Shama Khanna and collectively entitled ‘Flatness: Cinema after the Internet’, which – in contrast to the films of Price and Fanderl – sought to survey film and video that either ‘collapse time into information’ or ‘recapture the unevenness of life’ that this ‘flattening’ leaves behind. Although the programmes contained many interesting individual films and juxtapositions, the meaning that Khanna hoped to extract from the concept of ‘flatness’ proved elusive, and neither the accompanying catalogue essay nor her introductions to the various programmes helped matters. Reluctant to refer to the art-historical discourse of medium specificity or to elaborate a new definition of ‘flatness’, the term became an empty vessel into which pretty much any work or theory could be placed. Curiously, inspiration for Khanna’s concept seemed to come not from practices established since the advent of the Internet, but from the films and writing of Robert Bresson. Because of this confusion and lack of definition the title hung in the air, irritating people (not necessarily a bad thing). Perhaps it was Khanna’s intention to provide a framework so opaque that it couldn’t simply become an organizing principle for film selection. But it meant that confusion reigned when artists and filmmakers were asked to respond to the overarching theme during the Q&As that followed each programme.
Leslie Thornton, Strange Space (1992),
Under these conditions, the works that stood out did so by somehow simultaneously engaging with the programmes’ nascent thesis, whilst critiquing it and making room for their own singular investigations. One film that did this spectacularly was Rachel Reupke’s startling new work Wine and Spirits (2013). This silent film started life as a series of photographs and adverts, which she used as source material or storyboards. She built sets based on these images and peopled them with a male and female actor, who move very slowly, as if barely able to release themselves from photography’s frozen time. Wine and Spirits is a kind of alcohol-soaked paean to bad relationships. The two actors pose in a variety of generic outfits and in different contexts: outside a club drinking lager, inside a pub drinking stout, at a restaurant, weirdly in 1920s formal wear, drinking sherry. The intertitles contain snatches of conversation and occasionally song lyrics. The final scene, in a generic pub environment, with a dartboard hanging in the background, contains barely any movement at all. The woman’s strained expression seems to betray by turns anxiety and contentment. The man’s expression is sardonic, and pregnant with menace as his mouth moves to speak. The intertitle, when it finally arrives, knocks the wind out of her and the viewer: ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’
After this, a profile of Turner Prize nominee Laure Prouvost offered some light relief (although there was darkness here too) and also, perhaps, another way to think the problem of ‘flatness’. In I wish this video was deeper (2011), the London-based French artist expresses some frustration at the limitation of the moving image to provide a meaningful connection to an audience. Always looking for ways to express this frustration or to test ways of breaking through the fourth wall, Prouvost and Ian White contributed readings and performances in the intervals between her films. This worked well and made a convincing case for showing films that had originally made for a gallery context.
An engaging discussion between Thomas Elsaesser and Maeve Connolly entitled ‘What was Cinema?’ took place as part of the ‘podium’ events. Who knows how many times André Bazin’s question ‘What is Cinema?’ has been re-serviced in this way for a discussion about cinema’s future, and this one started in the way that all ‘curated’ discussions begin – with the speakers disassociating themselves from the title of the discussion. Connolly proposed the alternative, ‘What might cinema become?’ It was unclear, however, whether she was asserting that a future for cinema might be found in galleries and museums, and if so whether this was something that was interesting or desirable.
Ed Atkins, Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths (2013)
Elsaesser covered the technologies of cinema and the commodification of the ‘world of things’ by cinema. He also offered a pessimistic corollary to Connolly’s brief survey of recent practice by asserting that museums and galleries have staged a ‘hostile takeover’ of cinema and film history. Elsaesser also took issue with the title. However, he left the verb in Bazin’s formulation and instead took issue with the pronoun, suggesting a host of alternatives, including ‘When is cinema?’ and ‘Where is cinema?’ In what was, perhaps, a gentle critique of the ‘Flatness’ programme, Elsaesser began his talk by proposing that, ‘Digital changes everything and leaves it exactly as it was.’ His point was that cinema is now everywhere we look. It is there in the way we build and maintain social relations (whether mediated by technology or not) and it is there in the way we consume. This thesis doesn’t claim that cinema is dying, but rather that it is migrating. The effect of this migration, Elsaesser said, was the production of a ‘new cinephilia’ (distinct from the old cinephilia, which coveted rarity and the investment of time).
Something like this ‘new cinephilia’ was being examined and critiqued by many of the films in the ‘Flatness’ programme. Certainly Harun Farocki, who was represented by his recent film about the production of new flexible working space and practices A New Product (2012), has explored this idea since the late 1960s. Then there were other films of note that could wiggle into this thesis, such as Leslie Thornton’s Strange Space (1992), a film made in collaboration with the actor Ron Vawter, who reads extracts from a poem by Rilke over images of a sonogram – an examination of the medicalized body in cinematic space. Guest-curated by Ed Atkins, and including his own, Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths (2013) – the programme titled, ‘I Am Inventing You As You Are (Baselessness)’, contained work by James Richards, Helen Marten, Frances Stark and Bernadette Corporation. Stark was represented by episode ten of her mighty My Best Thing (2011), a film about projecting oneself into digital space in order to tell a story about selfhood. If this migration of the cinematic to the (digital) everyday has indeed occurred, then we have to go there to extract and tell stories, because there is nowhere else to go.