Of course the transition to a radical new way of organizing and presenting a film festival begs the question, what was lost and what was gained? For further information on the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, visit here. But they do connect to the other films in certain ways. Careful programming and a pioneering choice of subjects has helped the Festival to build up its exclusive position in an increasingly unpredictable market. For an individual, then, there was an element of the festival that was sadly missing. The full spectrum of light and radiation stands in for the full spectrum of gender or sexuality, parts of which are almost literally imperceptible or inconceivable to many. The first thing to report, then, is that the festival was a great success from a logistical and technical standpoint, a feat of frenzied, high-pressure arrangements that must have led to many sleepless nights. Oberhausen Film Festival Such film festivals – those extraordinary clusters of images, transports of light, of virtual worlds scattered across a real geography – pale in scale when considered next to the project of the www. They are reminiscent of the films of Warren Sonbert, both in their structure (constructed of fragments of footage organized visually and rhythmically rather than chronologically or geographically), and in their exquisite compositional beauty and editing patterns. It’s a highly personal testament, but at the very end Wilkinson elegantly widens the frame by turning the camera on a mirror, effectively drawing the viewer into the film, and prodding us to consider our own identities, perceptions, and judgments. IMDb, the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. Oberhausen is not only the oldest short film festival in the world, it is also one of the most important, alongside Tampere and Clermont-Ferrand. Well over 2,500 festival passes were sold in around 60 countries, over 1,000 trade visitors from almost 70 countries attended the online festival. Wagner makes room for snatches of break-time conversation between the workers, and glimpses of the objects they keep at their station—small filmic gestures that go a long way toward individualizing the workers, and preventing them from becoming mere figures in a landscape. Analogue film is still very much alive, despite many forecasts to the contrary. La transmisión en línea del Festival Internacional de Cortometrajes de Oberhausen se organiza de forma programática. Cuthand’s film revolves around the scandal that erupted during the 2019 Whitney Biennial concerning Warren B. Kanders, a co-chair of the Whitney Museum’s board whose company Safariland manufactures tear gas grenades. Jenny Brady's Receiver is a structurally ambitious film about communication and miscommunication. The city hosts the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and its Gasometer Oberhausen is an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage It can certainly be argued that, weighed in the balance, the increased ability for viewers across the world to engage with the festival and its films is more important than the opportunity for a much smaller, more privileged collection of people to gather in person. Watching travelogues—and more generally speaking, seeing work from and about so many different countries and regions—during a festival rendered “virtual” by a global pandemic was a bittersweet experience. Film series In February 1962, at the eighth annual Oberhausen Short Film Festival, a brief but impassioned manifesto was signed by 26 filmmakers and film professionals roundly criticizing conventional contemporary German cinema and calling for the creation of a new type of feature film based on new freedoms and a new type of film language. The festival holds an International Competition, German Competition, and International Children's and Youth Film Competition, as well as the MuVi Award for best German music video and, since 2009, the NRW Competition for productions from the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Share on whatsapp. Henri Plaat's Second War Hats (1986) presents a bizarre fashion show against a war-torn landscape. OBERHAUSEN FILM FESTIVAL 2020: PROGRAMA 2 DE LA COMPETENCIA INTERNACIONAL. The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is now inviting submissions to its 65 th edition, which will take place in Oberhausen from 1 to 6 May, 2019. Thirza Cuthand’s Less Lethal Fetishes is a wry but pointed take on the protests that erupted at last year's Whitney Biennial. But experience with the material and its projection practice is gradually getting lost in the digitized world of cinema. Where people do appear, they are generally solitary, in shadows, or lost in thought. It is used as an artistic medium in countless forms across the world, not only at festivals and in the cinemas. But thematically it stands apart, bearing witness with great candor and penetrating intelligence to the experience of being made to feel like an outsider in one’s own home, in one’s own landscape. Daves and his films were honored at the Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany in 1972. The competition provides a good overview of "serious", avant-garde short film productions (Hamburg, on the other hand, offers the more entertaining films). In particular, like the contemporaneous work of artists such as Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, James Nares, and numerous others, many of these video works comprise small gestures. Heather Trawick’s Isn’t It a Pity documents an amateur demolition derby. A confirmation mail was sent to your mail address.. And yet they do, they define it every time they ask me where I’m from.” Dandelions is a beautiful and eloquent film that deploys the techniques of a lyrical, interiorized cinema to lay bare the ways in which Western societies foster an (internalized, unexamined) idea of normalcy—of whiteness as “neutral” and everything else as “other”—and to illustrate the psychic toll on those who exist outside this construct. Though not the very first film festival in the Coronavirus era to shift into the virtual realm (earlier instances included CPH:DOX and the Ann Arbor Film Festival), Oberhausen was certainly in the first wave, which is to say that planning for the festival was far advanced when disaster struck. And for those familiar with the foundational works of American avant-garde cinema, it’s a fascinating Eastern European counterpart to the work of Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow—in fact, it’s almost like the Polish love-child of Frampton’s Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia) (1971) and Snow’s Wavelength (1967). Seem from a certain perspective, Heather Trawick’s Isn’t It a Pity (USA, 2019), screened in the International Competition, is a perfect companion piece to keep shiftin’. In some cases, they depict gestures—such as Jolanta Marcolla’s Kiss (1975), which repeats ad infinitum an image of a woman blowing kisses towards the camera (a highly gendered image, but here rendered ambiguous: is it seductive, affectionate, or is it a “kiss off”?). In Dandelions, Black Canadian filmmaker Dawn Wilkinson reflects on the experience of feeling socially excluded in one's own country. From the evidence of the seven films presented at Oberhausen, Plaat’s films fall into two broad categories: highly stylized, gleefully campy, and extravagantly performative works, and travelogues constructed from footage gathered during his journeys in far-flung regions of the globe. In a sense, Plaat finds an equivalence in the travelogue form for the heightened artificiality of his melodramas—he has such a remarkable eye and such an extraordinary command of cinematography that he finds the expressive, sensuous, and even glamorous qualities of his more constructed films in the landscapes he travels through and documents. Originally named the 1st West German Educational Film Festival, the inaugural event was organized in association with the Oberhausen Cinema Club (Filmclub Oberhausen). In Vika Kirchenbauer’s Untitled Sequence of Gaps, the spectrum of light becomes a metaphor for the spectrum of sexuality and gender. More than films are shared at a festival, especially one like Oberhausen that draws a particular international community of devotees of short and experimental cinema. A total of almost 42,000 Euros will be awarded in prize money. Receiver is an exceptional example of “intellectual montage”—its extraordinary conceptual richness is a function of its refusal to connect the dots between each of its discrete segments. It also happens to include one of the most unforgettable lines of the festival: when Hammer approaches an attractive but highly guarded young woman and asks what she’s reading, she says simply, “I just got through reading an article about raccoon rabies.”. Here the landscapes are those of Ontario, where Wilkinson—a black Canadian woman—grew up. Share on facebook. The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is now inviting submissions to its 64th edition, which will take place in Oberhausen from 3 to 8 May, 2018. So far I’ve focused on the contemporary films in Oberhausen’s lineup. To my eyes, they not only salvaged the festival, but presented one of its strongest editions in recent memory. A different, less violent, but still insidious form of exclusion suffuses Dawn Wilkinson’s Dandelions (Canada, 1995), which screened as part of the Distributors program drawn from the catalogue of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC). The 61st Oberhausen International Short Film Festival running April 30 — May 5, has selected 132 films from 41 countries for its five competitive programs. But Plaat’s taste for the flamboyant and expressive animates the travelogues as well, even if here it manifests in other ways, especially through the exaggerated, lopsided compositions. 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 13–18 May 2020. The Festival organises five competitions: International, German, films from North Rhine-Westphalia, International Children’s and Youth Films and the MuVi Award for the best German music video. The film premièred in 1961 at what would become the showcase for the new generation of German filmmakers, the Westdeutsche Kurzfilmtage (now known as the International … But in Trawick’s hands, it’s nothing if not a choreographed spectacle of elemental physical materials—a symphony of metal, fire, dust, and mud—and a duel between heavy machinery and objects of profound fragility (in this case, the flesh and blood drivers and mechanics). I share my thoughts on my favorite Asian films presented at the 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, which took place from May 13th to 19th via Online. The Waimiri–Atroari had earlier been driven nearly to extinction by the Brazilian Army due to the construction of a highway through their land. Welcome ! The opportunity to pause between films to take immediate notes or simply to reflect felt like a luxury that benefitted both the festivalgoer and the filmmakers, insofar as it prevented the films from blurring into each other. The history of the Waimiri-Atroari people of the Brazilian Amazon is the subject of Ana Vaz’s Why? But that momentary glitch was addressed quickly, and apparently was triggered by much higher demand than the festival anticipated, a sign of what was reportedly an unhoped-for success on the level of viewership as well. Live Q&As took place as well, conducted via video-chat, with daily Zoom meetings offering the opportunity to meet members of the festival’s staff (the festival director, Lars Henrik Gass, members of the press office or selection committees, other curators, and so on). The virtual closing ceremony of the 2020 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. On the other hand, the social dimension is much more than simply a distraction, it’s a crucial part of what makes festivals important and valuable. Oberhausen Film Festival. Share on pocket. The festival cites the COVID-19 virus spread in Los Angeles County and southern California for moving planned outdoor film screenings online. This program brings together some of the most interesting works from the 2019 International Competition of the Oberhausen Film Festival. It’s an exemplary instance of the genre, not least of all because Wagner resists the temptation to reduce the men (and at this particular factory, the workers are indeed exclusively male) to anonymous components of a mechanical process and a cinematic spectacle. Destruction is an ingenious, witty, and brain-tickling meditation on the instability of the image and the deceptive nature of filmic space. In this way, the audiences are more able to catch most of the Film Festival along its duration. The result is enormously entertaining, as men, women, and children speak to each other across normally invisible but rarely broached divides of race, culture, and class (with varying degrees of comfort). The online edition of the 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen from 13 to 18 May 2020 has proved far more successful than expected. Nevertheless, perhaps the two most memorable programs emerged from the archival/historical component of the festival. It was a simpler time, at least for me.”). The basic structure of the festival—with its various sections including the International, German, and other Competitions, the Profiles showcasing individual artists, the Archives screenings focusing on particular institutions’ collections, the Distributor component wherein short film distributors ply their wares, and so on and so forth—remained intact. In the course of more than five decades, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen has become one of the world's most respected film events - a place where filmmakers and artists ranging from Roman Polanski to Cate Shortland, from George Lucas to Pipilotti Rist have presented their first films. For this “Art on the Subway” commission, Hammer interviewed unsuspecting straphangers about their experiences of the subway, and encouraged various riders to break the unspoken vow of subway privacy and engage in conversation with their neighbors. Launched in 1995, relentlessly connecting films to festivals, reporting and promoting festivals worldwide.. A brand new website will soon be available. The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, founded in 1954, is one of the oldest short film festivals in the world. In total, Internet users in nearly 100 countries watched the festival films on the net. In the course of six decades, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen has developed into one of the most highly acclaimed cultural events worldwide – a place where renowned figures like Agnès Varda, Martin Scorsese, … As part of his project, Schwade encouraged them to create drawings of their lives, their environment and culture, and the history of their conflicts with the Brazilian government. Free of the “distractions” of socializing with fellow filmgoers, programmers, curators, and writers, of the temptation to skip programs in favor of visits to the festival café or the nightly parties, I ended up watching significantly more of the festival’s programs than usual. In the course of more than five decades, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen has become one of the world's most respected film events - a place where filmmakers and artists ranging from Roman Polanski to Cate Shortland, from George Lucas to Pipilotti Rist have presented their first films. (1973) are masterpieces of the form—shot in almost miraculously vibrant and luminous Kodachrome, they are joyful in their inventiveness and visual beauty, but with an undertone of disturbing mystery. (Apiyemiyekî?) In the age of necessary social distancing, we would like to highlight a remarkable film which fulfils the noblest vocation of art, fostering an emotional connection between people from different times and geographical locations. The always-invaluable Archives section—which showcases the collections and preservation projects of various international film archives—included an extraordinary program presented by the Polish organization, Fundacja Arton, focusing on experimental video artists in Poland in the mid-to-late 1970s. About the festival: Oberhausen is not only the oldest short film festival in the world, it is also one of the most important, alongside Tampere and Clermont-Ferrand.… The Oberhausen International Short Film Festival was founded in 1954 and is the oldest and largest short film forum in the world. The city hosts the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and its Gasometer Oberhausen is an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. Oberhausen has managed to instigate various political and aesthetical Most of the programs featured an introduction from the filmmaker or curator, while each film in the Competition programs was followed by a prerecorded Q&A between the filmmaker and a member of the selection committee. As Wagner portrays it, it’s hard to decide which is more extraordinary: the elemental physical materials and forces that are involved (glass in its molten and solid forms, but also the metal molds used to shape it, the heat and steam it emanates, the water used for cooling, and the air the workers force into the glass objects by means of hoses or their own lungs), or the intricate, hypnotic gestures and movements the workers employ to manipulate and form the glass. A New York Subway Tape, Barbara Hammer interviewed subway riders. Toured with Oberhausen special program in over 30 cities worldwide. At one of the Podium sessions, art historian Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht gruffly declared that he found the practice “annoying” … The festival focuses on innovative, artistic short films, paying special attention to new technical … Most of the films in the selection fell into the first category—these are unmistakably in the tradition of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, with their loving, happily threadbare subversion of Hollywood glamour and the tropes of melodrama, and the use of actors in drag, who perform directly to the camera. Jadwiga Singer’s Destruction (1978) is an ingenious meditation on the deceptive nature of filmic space. Gathering together ten short video works, the program was illuminating on multiple levels. 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