Oberhausen Short Film Festival

Oberhausen Short Film Festival, now in its 54th year, is a remarkable institution in a nondescript town in the Ruhrgebiet that offers few distractions from the intensity of days spent viewing, thinking and talking. As a progressive institution founded in the 50s, it can be compared with Documenta, but as an experience - at least in contrast to the duff tourist trip the art world collectively sold itself with last summer's Documenta - it is far livelier. The commitment to brevity means that films from a wide variety of contexts, outside those sanctioned by television and art biennales, have a chance of being shown, both in the youth, international and German competitions and in the thematic programmes.

These guest-curated programmes are unrestricted in their historical range, and allow Oberhausen's own history to come into view and redefine itself. The festival has a strong association with political film: for years, and not cravenly, it engaged in dialogue with the GDR, the Eastern bloc, and especially Yugoslavia. Documentary and ethnographic film, developed self-consciously as aesthetic forms, have been important strands here, along with artists' film, and this sharing of territory allows the claims of artists' film on the cultural capital of experiment to be contested and art's social imagination to come up against arguments about political strategy and responsibility. Gestures, whether aesthetic or political, are exposed by being aired to critical audiences with widely varying commitments, knowledge and expectations. Europa 2005, made for TV in 2006 by Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub (their last film), led to a walk-out on both counts. Its five pans of the dead end where two young Arab Parisians from the suburbs were electrocuted fleeing police in 2005 - not that anyone unfamiliar with news footage of the time could know this - are followed by a pat, repeated equation between concentration camp and electric chair. Challenging easy humanist identification, I can hear the blurb go: very annoying. Fortunately En rachâchant, 1982, their comic account of a boy who does not want to be taught things he doesn't know, was also shown.

In contrast, the resilience of some basically humanist assumptions, as they emerged from the past of radical film, was striking: in René Vautier's Afrique 50, 1950, credited as the first explicitly anti-colonial film, and especially in Eli Lothar's Aubervillers, 1945, which emerges from a meeting of song, Surrealism, Popular Front optimism and profound knowledge of photography. The ruins here are not those of war, but poverty: we are shown the dignified way poor people arrange themselves for the camera, rather than a simple picturing of them. In the powerful closing section, images of poverty we have seen are shown in succession within a gold picture frame in a shabby parlour open to the sky, as the commentary expresses the wish that such images would by now be historic. This astonishing find was screened in Sherry Milner's and Ernest Larsen's programme, Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers, and in this context seemed to ask: what form might such hopefulness now take? Their selections, some curated with Madeleine Bernstorff, provided vibrant opportunities for thinking about the relative strengths of collective and individual work, and for understanding the social moment of filmmaking: that which informs both its making and its reception. The programmes were unafraid of content - from garbage to education - and highly structured. They were also inspiring in their heterogeneity, in that the variety of times, places and modes, especially a combination of the didactic and the comic, came together intellectually as sequences and provocations, not merely as themes. There was a huge amount to learn here, and a lack of fear about sharing that knowledge.

People learning things often featured: in Kevin Everson's According To, 2007, an old man is shown repeatedly receiving the morning newspaper on his porch as contrasting accounts of interracial murder, in the style of newspaper reports and the black oral tradition, are related. Jill Godmilow, in What Farocki Taught, 1997, portrays herself learning from another filmmaker, and remaking his film shot for shot. Sharon Hayes, in Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screed #16, 2002, is helped by an off-screen group of voices correcting her faulty recitation of the Patty Hearst kidnapping tapes: a weirdly inverted call-and-response routine. Hayes featured also in Ian White's Making History screenings, in a 'performative event': a live phone link-up from San Francisco, as selected films we had seen were shown again. This felt underconceived as an investigation of telepresence or as a way of bringing the present moment into view. Malcolm Le Grice's Castle One, 1966, complete with functional lightbulb hanging in front of the screen, worked better in this regard.

White's selections, titled Whose History?, were a continuation or conclusion of his approach at Oberhausen last year in Kinomuseum (see AM308; there is now a book of this project) but seemed over-focused on aesthetic surfaces and puzzling in its approach to history. His work as a film curator in London has been generously supportive of new work and of older artist-filmmakers in need of attention, but the new work selected here, including that by Emily Wardill (her film screened earlier this year at the ICA) and Emily Roysdon (Social Movement, 2004) seemed bafflingly self-absorbed and claustrophobically insulated. The session on Documents, however, was notably impressive: it included Ken Jacobs's Perfect Film(unedited footage of eyewitness accounts of Malcolm X's assassination, as found in a bin) and a powerful work by The Speculative Archive. Surfaces were also explictly foregrounded in the welcome profile screening of films by Lis Rhodes, conceived as part of the Whose History? series: a text of hers reprinted in the catalogue provided that title. News, also, were the films by Alexander Kluge. The release of a 16-disc DVD edition of Kluge's works is enabling comprehensive evaluation of a filmmaker much less well known than his contemporaries in the New German Cinema.

Sitting in darkened rooms with others, fellow travellers in interest one assumes, can be romanticised. It can make one ask 'what could we be doing if we weren't doing this' in fired-up tones of excitement or in downcast impatience. The social exchange that characterises Oberhausen can also be romanticised: the presence of filmmakers can limit, as well as extend, post-screening discussions. Both panel discussions devoted to the thematic programmes included speakers who had been flown in, seemingly through the festival's anxious stage-managing of the curators. (Status games are played out, even in a shared atmosphere of criticality.) These speakers, however interesting their comments, could not have been as committed to attending the screenings as the audiences, or direct their arguments to what we had seen in detail. No one approaches panel discussions with an entirely light heart, but the effect was one of of devaluing the audience's enthusiasm and desire for discussing and responding to what it had actually seen, which had frequently felt a privilege.

Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany, www.kurzfilmtage.de.

This report was originally published in May 2008 / No 317, p37.

Ian Hunt is deputy editor of Art Monthly.

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