transcribed
and expanded first impressions captured on voice recorder, 2014:
I find Oberhausen to
be a pleasant town of appealing proportions. The architecture is
oddly varied except in its height that rarely seems to exceed four
stories. Much rebuilt after the devastating bombing raids of the
second world war, it's as if the structures mistrust the sky and
huddle down together, close to the ground, trying to present hard
targets. The style of certain wide yet un-assuming avenues furnished
with rows of terraced townhouses reminds me of the Quai au Foin in
Brussels or other towns with Flemish influence, the kind of terrain
where a dreamy city roamer must always keep one eye on the pavement
lest he wander into some unnoticed historic canal. The local
residents go about their business and appear to be tucked up in bed
by eleven o'clock. Once a year the film festival arrives...
This year it didn't. Or it
didn't while at the same time it did, last month May 13th - 19th. So
much dialogue surrounding the type of moving image celebrated and
explored at Oberhausen Short Film Festivals has, of recent years,
concerned itself with uncertainty and vulnerabilities of the medium
itself. Is cinema dead? Does the digital image provide an adequate
replacement for the film strip? What chance do artist labs and
co-operatives, independent screens and facilities have when even
industrial chains are potentially being driven out of business by
apparently global overcooking of property prices? (1)
The forces that define
ontologies shift. Pressures create imprints, mold and shape. There
was a time when independent film makers faced impossible costs for
equipment and material. Then having strived for a means to produce,
they were met with the terrible reality that barely anyone would be
able to witness it. The systems of distribution allowed little to no
space for independent, experimental or underground work and short
work has always struggled to find audiences. Cheap, high quality
digital equipment solved the first of these problems. The accessibility
of high bandwidth cyberspace put an end to the second.
More recently constraints on
physical spaces in which to make and present work have increased year
on year with little hope of abating. For a society invested in the
virtual, material space is commanding an outrageous premium.
Which is why events like
Oberhausen continue to be important to the world of short film and
video. But if cinema can survive the (near) death of film, the transition into the less material domains of the digital – how
would the ontology of an specific material durational event such as
a long standing film festival fare online?
With over 2500 passes sold and
1000 trade visitors I guess the simplest answer would be – pretty
well.
The selection of films lined up
at Oberhausen this year often seemed to address the lack of physical
stimuli ; large darkened audatoria, drinks and chats with makers,
viewers and critics on the pedestrianised thoroughfare outside Kino
Lichtburg, glasses of cold Bitburger -- with work that provoked a
sense of the haptic, the sensations of the flesh, the indexicality so privileged by exponents of analogue.
The
immersive pleasure of the cinema auditorium may have been absent
whilst watching a video such as Bog Body (2019, 16m, Joonas
Hyvönen) on a laptop sat on a messy desk during lockdown but there
were invitations to be immersed elsewhere – in a very wet (digital)
peat bog for instance. This place we discover, like film, video and
digital, is a storage space for memory. To slip into this quagmire,
like the crooning protagonist, is to become deathly, spectral, like
the sonar image of a shipwreck too deep to be experienced as anything
other than a ghost. The objects within the bog have become merely
images, recordings. And yet the trade off here is a potentially fair
one, as with any film subject, to enter the bog offers a possibility
of immortality. As storage media go, peat preserves very well and resident Tardigrades have excellent memories (and not just for bad jokes).
Bog Body, Joonas Hyvönen, courtesy of AV-arkki
Storage
media and sensory mash up are also central in Patent Nr: 314805 (2020, 2m, Mika Taanila) Here a very early attempt to record sound
onto film, rediscovered in the Finnish Film Archives, boldly
dominates the screen, bringing with it synesthesia and a reminder
that film has been, at every step not just recorder as in live action
filming, or means of synthesis as in animation but an analytic tool
as in the chronophotography of Marey, Muybridge and many successors
who have used the power of film to visualise that previously
invisible.
Patentti Nr. 314805, Mika Taanila, courtesy of Kurzfilmtage
The process created by in 1914 by Eric Tigerstedt, the 'Edison of Finland' no less, captured sound as stark, vivid monochrome images with an enigmatic device he called the Photomagnetophone. During an post screening Zoom interview, Taanila was asked several times how the images were created and, it seems, he either doesn't know or prefers the mystery of the process to remain undivulged. Either way the fluttering stripes of sound that run vertically down the screen are spellbinding to watch and remarkably similar to the optical sound systems that would become industry standards some years later. The undulating recordings are also reminiscent of a sine wave displayed on an oscilloscope – an image that would become a cross genre cinematic trope to denote the white heat of science and visualisations of the futuristic and the unknown. They must surely have looked that way in 1914.
The process created by in 1914 by Eric Tigerstedt, the 'Edison of Finland' no less, captured sound as stark, vivid monochrome images with an enigmatic device he called the Photomagnetophone. During an post screening Zoom interview, Taanila was asked several times how the images were created and, it seems, he either doesn't know or prefers the mystery of the process to remain undivulged. Either way the fluttering stripes of sound that run vertically down the screen are spellbinding to watch and remarkably similar to the optical sound systems that would become industry standards some years later. The undulating recordings are also reminiscent of a sine wave displayed on an oscilloscope – an image that would become a cross genre cinematic trope to denote the white heat of science and visualisations of the futuristic and the unknown. They must surely have looked that way in 1914.
Tigerstedt's
comparison to Edison reinforces the oft stated fact that the American
was as inspired a businessman as inventor. The Phonomagnetophone,
like many other innovations by the prophetic Tigerstedt went
unrewarded and it seems he died in 1925 having received little
recognition for his work.
A
highlight of the festival for me was Susannah Gent's Psychotel
(2020, 60m) that explores the
uncanny, though montages of rich image and spoken text, evocations of
horror film and folk tale. Gent,
a taxidermist, understands that, like a photograph as described by
Barthes – the stuffed cadaver and the representational moving image
function both a transgression of death and memento mori – a
reminder of it's inescapability.
The
corridors of the Psyhotel are those Kubrick chased Steadicam
operators along – a flying eye perspective rushing towards a date
with unknown. We observe it's rooms as if through a peepholes carved
in the wall. The
otherliness of the hotel room exists partly in the fluidity of it's
possession. What is 'my room' was recently someone else's. And yet,
as witnessed in Norman Bate's post homicidal tidy up, all trace of
previous occupant's presence has been erased. That's part of the
service, delivered by unseen and unknown hands.
Like
their bodily counterparts, the living, spectres require a space. Most
fictional texts that concern themselves with haunting embed the
ghosts and their back stories around a physical location or space.
The house built on an ancient burial ground, the Gothic castle, the
suburban home tormented by previous tenants who had met bitterly
violent ends. The
hotel room is more of a palimpsest, with any personal,
durational or emotional investment or charge created during
occupation being thoroughly erased before the next tenant takes
residency may seem unlikely space for a haunting on these terms. The
hotel room resists the imposition of the type of histories that the
supernatural appear to demand and yet, uncannily, the spooky hotel
finds itself charged with a extra burst of eeriness. Certain
revenants ignore check out time and as for observing the 'do not
disturb' signs, well...
Mark
Fisher, describes the eerie a sense of 'something where there
should be nothing, or there is nothing where there should be
something.' (2) The hotel with it's long empty corridors, and quasi
private spaces, that lack evidence of personal occupation clearly
meet the latter of these definitions and when there is suggestion
that some presence, psychic or supernatural exists within this
neutral, generic place the former is evoked.
As illuminated by Laura Mulvay, (3) Freud saw the uncanny as a troubling reconnection with repressed figments of a shared or personal past. To experience the uncanny was to re-encounter traces of fears previously believed to have been overcome. For Ernst Jentsch, the uncanny was as much about that which made strange in the presentation of elements that provoke a sense of 'intellectual uncertainty', that which operates in ways that we cannot fathom – a technological uncanny. (4)
As illuminated by Laura Mulvay, (3) Freud saw the uncanny as a troubling reconnection with repressed figments of a shared or personal past. To experience the uncanny was to re-encounter traces of fears previously believed to have been overcome. For Ernst Jentsch, the uncanny was as much about that which made strange in the presentation of elements that provoke a sense of 'intellectual uncertainty', that which operates in ways that we cannot fathom – a technological uncanny. (4)
Gent's film exemplifies both definitions excellently and the sense of unearthing of anxieties and tropes from a repressed past, their manifestation in abjection and unease are balanced against masterful conception, direction and visuality that impress with as vivid sense of the contemporary.
As to the uncanniness of the festival that was not there and it's the
doppelgänger Oberhausen's 66th Internationale
Kurzfilmtage, 2020... it would appear to follow Jentsch rather than Freud.
It is a celebration of cinematic vision, voice and spectacle that
astounds with the novel and the cutting edge. A showcase for another
year's inspiration and hard work from around the globe. As for Freud's definition of the uncanny, it simply does not
function as a repression or revenant when, even during the Covid lockdown of 2020, it never really went
away.
- I'm referring to the closure of the Multiscreen Sony Cinestar at Potsdamerplatz, Berlin which was apparently shut due to rising rent costs. The excellent repertory and experimental screens at the close by Arsenal happily continue.
- Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (Repeater, 2017)
- Laura Mulvay, Death 24x a Second (Reaktion Books, 2006)
- Ernst Jentsch, On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906), Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919)
