Are we "Out of Time"?

Every aspect of contemporary life is accelerating to the point that it seems impossible to experience time directly. Our technologies of labour and leisure divide time into infinitesimal units; it is packaged and sold back to us as the sensation of

"liveness", "quality time", even the privilege to be bored or to take "time out". We surf the Web, listen to the radio, cook and argue, all at once; we work 24/7 and wish there were more hours in the day. But is this really how most people experience time?

"Out of Time," the special program of the 47^th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (3-8 May 2001), works on the assumption that perceptions of time vary vastly, that there are many ways to be "out of time," that is, to experience consciously an

d viscerally time's imperatives, its limits and its effects. The idea of mass acceleration is challenged by the rural, by cultural context and sex, and even such mundane questions as unemployment or underemployment. From a different point of view, to be "out of time" implies on the one hand an acute lack of time, the desire to measure, compress, accelerate; and on the other hand, a yen for suspension, timelessness, the outside of time. Time-based media themselves, like human bodies, can contract or expand the experience of time.

In the Oberhausen tradition, these 17 programs include works in a broad range of media and genres, from archival instructional film to television advertising to experimental film and video art.

The curators

The "Out of Time" guest programmers are Robin Curtis and Laura U. Marks. Robin Curtis is a Canadian media theorist, curator and filmmaker who has been based in Berlin since 1989.  She is currently a research fellow in the Media Studies Department at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Potsdam-Babelsberg.

Dr. Laura U. Marks is a media theorist and programmer, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University, and the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses; she lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Nine international artists, curators, archivists and scholars will present guest programs and performances.

The programs and presentations

curated by Robin Curtis and Laura Marks:

 
1. End of Time

A program tracing the visceral lure of the end of time and the range of representations which offer a vicarious proximity to the eye of the hurricane, to the epoch-ending moment.

 
2. Compression / Repression

Here we observe documents of the past, whether documentary or narrative, which each in their own way suggest that the attention of the viewer finds its way into such moments through the temporal concentration of the viewing experience, one which connotes pastness and accessibility at once.

 
3. Faster! Faster!

Time fragmented becomes information, and as such time becomes a commodity. These works reflect on the instrumentalisation of time, whether to exploit it, as in the online soap opera I-Feuilleton, or to critique it. Unable to trust that events will endure, we endow them with intensity: adrenaline rush followed by numbness.

 
4. Patience

Time stands still. Patience, paralysis, or suspension of judgement, is necessary to allow something new to emerge, be it a moment of contact, the words with which to speak, or another chance for art.

 
5. The City Rages, the Country Sleeps

A subtle exploration of the "time and the other" thesis that the metropolis projects its fantasies of timelessness on the countryside. This program observes the range of subtle differences in the experience of time from the heart of the city to the expanse of the tundra, with a long stop in suburbia.

 
6. Anachrony

This program examines the simultaneous presence of various kinds of temporal experience within a given culture or time frame. Addressing feminist and diasporan and intercultural modes of experience (and thus both questions of tempo and time frame) these works suggest the many facets which dwell within the "here and now."

 
7. Mortality and Motility

Moving through the range in ways in which time measurement is transposed onto the body (from artificial reproduction and biorhythm to stress and "quality time") this program draws on advertising, sports jargon, film and "vintage" video to suggest the attraction and anxiety of time-keeping.

 
8. Exercises in Endurance

"Endurance" connotes both suffering and the passage of time. Although we are rarely really present to our bodies, the body's expression of the experience of time falls between the poles of suffering and boredom. Ritual dignifies the body's suffering; performance transforms unremarkable moments into direct experiences of time.