56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 29 April - 4 May 2010

 

Press review

 

This festival looks back on a history of 56 years now, which makes it a little younger than its more glamorous sister Cannes; it’s a lot more experimental and unpredictable, though. Film and art are nowhere closer than in Oberhausen. It’s really a must for all art lovers! Bernhart Schwenk, ART Magazin, May 2010

 

Notwithstanding its great variety of films, Oberhausen very earnestly aspires to a “holistic” notion of the cinema, always brought up to the latest theoretical state of the arts via presentation and discussion. Short films in Oberhausen are condensed cinema. Hans Schifferle, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 5 May 2010

 

(Oberhausen) still feels different from any other major film festival - younger, less formal, and edgier (...) Tom Gunning, Artforum, September 2010

 

When it comes to demonstrating the scope and potency of short film, nobody does it quite like Oberhausen. Isabel Stevens, Sight & Sound Online Exclusive, Great Britain, May 2010

 

The accumulation of impressions at a short film festival echoes the tempting but confusing variety of video platforms on the Internet. The Oberhausen festival, which has just ended, is an exception: The oldest short film festival took place for the 56th time this year and is still the most renowned of its kind – because of its exacting selection. Christoph Huber, Die Presse (Austria), 6 May 2010

 

[Festival director Lars Henrik] Gass used the occasion of the opening ceremony to re-confirm Oberhausen’s reputation as a driving force of innovation in Germany’s film festival landscape. He announced a new co-operation with online-film.org, which is to open new distribution opportunities for short filmmakers on the Internet. Reinhard Kleber, Filmecho Filmwoche, 7 May 2010

 

For almost six decades, Oberhausen has been a synonym for experimental short films. (...) The oldest short film festival in the world is still the focal point of the international short film scene. Rainer Bellenbaum, Texte zur Kunst, September 2010

 

The Oberhausen festival though, even domesticated in a small strip of the pedestrian zone and hanging on the drip of public cultural funding, is still trying to throw spanners into the cycle of event culture and commercialisation hysteria (after all, the festival existed long before the idea of becoming European Capital of Culture provoked even a sardonic smile in even the most ambitious local politician). Now one might blasphemously argue that the festival can afford it, since there is no money in short film anyway. But there are few festivals where the audience are invited to talk with the filmmakers as they are here; even fewer where those filmmakers have anything clever to say about their films. Tim Slagman, Der Freitag, 5 May 2010

 

The 56th edition of the Oberhausen festival will undoubtedly be remembered for the fact that its return to the origins of cinematography produced the most varied and lasting impressions. The two curators, Eric de Kuyper and Mariann Lewinsky, had brought around 100 films – and, in Donald Sosin, a highly motivated piano player. Isabella Reicher, Der Standard (Austria), 6 May 2010

 

One of the key virtues of this series is the creativity and intelligence of the selections and groupings, two enduring hallmarks of Oberhausen programming. Jonathan Rosenbaum, jonathanrosenbaum.com, 23 May 2010

 

On five days at the beginning of May, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Mecca for experimental short films, quite simply turned our history of film upside down. Under the title “From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918” a magnificent programme could be found, curated by Mariann Lewinsky […] and under the patronage of Eric de Kuyper. An extraordinary experience, accompanied by one-man-orchestra Donald Sosin, which beamed us to a place where the whole wealth of the seventh art in its earliest days could be discovered, a forgotten and hushed up continent. Donald James, Bref, France, August 2010

 

For a festival whose currency is contemporary experimental fare, „From the Deep“ was a brave new world, with one of Oberhausen’s programmers admitting that even the festival’s director, Lars Henrik Gass, had reservations about its sustainability. It’s testament to the broad church that is Oberhausen that it went ahead regardless. Isabel Stevens, Sight & Sound, Great Britain, August 2010

 

The “56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen”, which ended yesterday, was […] just the right place for this in many respects astonishing retrospective that brought together early short films from 1898 to 1918 under the poetic title “From the Deep”. Rüdiger Suchsland, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 May 2010

 

In order to discover new things, it is sometimes necessary to travel back in time, to the beginnings. The big retrospective “From the Deep” […] was dedicated to early cinema from 1898 to 1918, a time when there were no experimental films, when cinema itself was an experiment. The poetic anarchy of this archaeological found footage, the old voodoo of celluloid, enchanted a festival audience who usually handle only digital media with confidence. […] Oberhausen as a hyper reality, where old and new, fiction and documentary, cinema space and public space merge for a few days in May. Hans Schifferle, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 5 May 2010

 

Taking viewers back to the vaudevillian dawn of cinema, the 56th edition of the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival was reflective and historiographical in intent, but light-hearted and genial in spirit. The main themed programme was titled “From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918”, an impressive collection of around a hundred short films from the dawn of cinema. Colin Perry, www.frieze.com (Great Britain), 16 May 2010

 

These works were nevertheless a welcome expansion of the notion of the cinema evident in Oberhausen, which – for all its radical commitment – remains firmly committed to the darkened screening room. Colin Perry, www.frieze.com (Great Britain), 16 May 2010

 

One of the most interesting elements of this programme [From the Deep] was its evident grappling with how to present these films: to at once recoup them as bona fide objects of both study and entertainment – placing them within a film-historical lineage – and to position them as exceptional, palpably different from the films that followed World War I. Rejecting the term 'primitive cinema', the curators chose the spatial metaphor of these films being from 'another continent', thus emphasising the discontinuities - over the continuities - between what was on show in these films and what we are accustomed to today. Melissa Gronlund, afterall.org, 9 August 2010

 

The 56th Oberhausen festival constructed a moveable musée imaginaire. Brought together from film institutes and archives all over the world, the most extensive retrospective so far with its more than 100 works, excellently curated by experts Mariann Lewinsky and Eric de Kuyper, displayed the variety and originality of these pioneer works of one to 14 minutes. Andreas Wilink, K.West, April 2010

 

Short film is short film, the Oberhausen festival decided, and presented ten programmes full of 100 astonishing, fantastical, thrilling films from that early period of time between the turn of the century and 1918, which the Swiss curator Mariann Lewinsky called the most creative age of silent film. “Before World War One, anything seemed possible in moving images”, says the film historian, “after that, standardisation set in.” Arnold Hohmann, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 April 2010

 

It’s magnificent that Oberhausen enabled its audience to experience the courage of these early years, this devil-may-care approach to filmmaking, in an immediate and surprisingly fresh manner. Achim Lettmann, Westfälischer Anzeiger, 3 May 2010

 

Not a trace of ceremoniousness or solemnity when the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen organises an expedition to the Deep. In view of the associations evoked by this, the mythic continent of Atlantis is not far: lost treasures appear before one’s inner eye, a fabulous variety and – yes, this too – the outlines (or remains) of a lost utopia. The project of making early cinema visible and tangible is targeted not so much at a circle of certified experts but rather at a curious audience who are allowed, maybe even expected, to be naïve. Ralph Eue, Filmdienst, 15 April 2010

 

What everybody flocked to see in Oberhausen this year, and what they did see in crowded and enthusiastically received screenings, was the retrospective of very early cinema “From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918”, curated by Mariann Lewinsky and Eric de Kuyper. It was really a rare highlight of seldom screened treasures from the archives. Peer Schmidt, junge welt, 6 May 2010

 

At the 56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, early cinema just stepped out of the archives with a flourish – “From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918” was the title of a ten-part special programme of European films from the first 20 years. It fits: early films were rarely longer than 15 minutes and were screened in Oberhausen as a series of uplifting, comic, informative and entertaining moments. The gamut ran from western movies to scientific films, from the magnificent, hand-coloured magic worlds of the “féeries” to the re-enactment of a pre-Eisensteinian sailor’s revolt. Silvia Hallensleben, Der Tagesspiegel, 8 May 2010

 

The topic of debates about “The Idea of the Self” - the claim that this “self” is an invention of the 20^th century, of marketing, political propaganda and advertising psychology - could also be seen to stand for the distance that cinema covered in the last century. Oberhausen demonstrated, at least in rudimentary form, what cinema, which in the age of Youtube is returning to expressive fun fair origins, might contribute to the future of this idea or the resurgence of the subject. Rüdiger Suchsland, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 May 2010

 

A strong special programme was dedicated to the so-called No Wave, a cycle of cheaply made independent films produced in New York between 1978 and 1982. New York, its economy in tatters at the time, never looked paler or more broken down than in these desperate and vivid trash movies between super 8 and early video, shot by Rock musicians and filmmakers like Beth B., John Lurie, Vivienne Dick, James Nares, Lydia Lunch and Bette Gordon. Hans Schifferle, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 5 May 2010

 

"No Wave", an emblematic and controversial term. This energy of the years from about 1976 to 1980, those few restless years in a broken down New York, before lower Manhattan sterilised itself completely […] That situation was a call for fresh air that reached a youth in revolt against formalistic monotony. This generation founded its own collective identity of self-expression […], fed by a do-it-yourself spirit mutated through the media. Elisabeth Lebovici, poptronics.fr (France), 5 May 2010

 

One of the focus programmes, dedicated to a contemporary filmmaker who is probably among the most singular and idiosyncratic in the world, turned out to be exotic, but far more complex and graceful. Seven shorts by the Indian director Amit Dutta, who is only 32, open our eyes to a cosmos that has no equal anywhere in the world. Brilliant montages, baffling the eye as well as the urge to interpret, are interwoven with a complex labyrinth of allusions, from historical reminiscences, fairytales, children’s stories, mystical cues, religious symbolism and texture through to media reality as contributed by radio and television samples. Without precursors – except possibly for a distant echo of Sergey Pardshanov’s avant-garde play with childhood memories -, Dutta makes his viewers reel between magic realism and a dream logic which transforms fragments into mystic cognitive hallucinations. Dieter Wieczorek, schnitt.de, August 2010

 

Other special programmes were worth looking at, too: for example the slim tribute to Swedish-American experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson, born in 1931. Isabella Reicher, Der Standard (Austria), 6 May 2010

 

Well-known directors and their latest works provided the lasting memories of the German Competition. Corinna Schnitt’s “Hänschen Klein” was a kind of urban local-colour film framed in the miniature format of a single long shot, a seven-minute zoom backwards taking us from a porcelain painting to a street panorama and teaching us to see. Rüdiger Suchsland, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 May 2010

 

Ever since 1999, music videos battling for the festival award can be enjoyed at Oberhausen. The most extraordinary visual anomalies usually have the greatest chances of winning a MuVi Award. INTRO, April 2010

 

After we saw the hype revolving around the popular music video genre dwindle noticeably recently, not least due to the gradual disappearance of music television, a distinct re-animation could be discerned this year. A genre which may have found new platforms on the Internet (almost all the clips in the programme are on YouTube) but still needs to prove its own relevance as an art form is making a virtue out of necessity: using quotes and irony, it demonstrates how modernity never ceases to grow old. Dirk Frank, Westfälischer Anzeiger, 4 May 2010

 

What can the video achieve nowadays? More than illustrate the music? Stand on its own feet as an independent art form? Be avant-garde? Provoke? These are some of the question raised by every MuVi Award – and answered every year by the directors in a multitude of ways. Sabine Danek, www.page-online.de, 14 April 2010

 

Someone recently asked me with pity whether it wasn’t a miserable job to organise a film festival in Oberhausen, which has difficulties getting the recognition here that it has on an international level, in a city where the old are in the majority, where the young move away because they find neither training nor job opportunities. I answered that this festival had to take place here, and nowhere else but here – and just the way it is. Right here, where the challenges are more visible, perhaps more brutal than anywhere else, that is the place for this kind of work. Lars Henrik Gass, Neue Ruhr Zeitung, 22 April 2010

 

The great Lichtburg cinema was full of Oberhausen citizens not just during the screenings for kindergarten and school classes, but also on Saturday and Sunday, because parents came with their kids. At least. Gudrun Mattern, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 May 2010

 

The festival managed to integrate other venues like Druckluft, b.a.r., K14 or Altenberg better than ever before. Festival director Lars Henrik Gass called it a successful expansion. The fact that some of the works that were screened and received awards elude all interpretation and that “not every film has to be understood”, as the former tongue in cheek motto of the festival has it, did not drive audiences away. Lars Henrik Gass reported a 4 % increase in sold tickets. Helen Sibum, Neue Ruhr Zeitung, 5 May 2010

 

It is a pity [that few Oberhausen citizens visit the festival], for it is clear that the festival is opening towards a non-expert audience more and more every year, with additional programmes (“Laute Kinder”) and new “side venues” (Zentrum Altenberg, Fabrik K14, Druckluft). Susanne Schmengler, Wochen-Anzeiger Oberhausen, 8 May 2010