Guest blogger: Oberhausen - part two by George Clark

As the oldest short film festival in the world, the unique strength of the Oberhausen often lies in drawing from its own remarkable history. Two of the special programmes this year returned to the past of Oberhausen in different way; firstly in the retrospective of Nicolás Echevarría, a Mexican documentary filmmaker, whose only experience of the festival until last year was having his first film Judea (Mexico, 1974) rejected by the festival 30 years ago.

His work draws from traditions of ethnographic and experimental film to document remote communities in rural Mexico. Poetas campesinos (1980) documents a rural circus which Echevarría stumbled across while travelling rural Mexico. Unable to raise funding for 5 years when Echevarría finally returned he found the group disbanded and so went about bringing the different performers together for his film resulting in a somewhat mediated portrait of a tradition which has already dissolved. Judea: Semana Santa entre los Coras on the other hand is a remarkable document of the Easter celebration by the Cora Indians, who have retained but uniquely modified Catholic rituals to their own ends over many years since the departure of missionaries from the region. The film presents an unadorned series of actions, processions and rituals with respect for their own integrity without attempting to explain or comment upon them.

In a different vein the festival also presented a retrospective of the Sarajevo Documentary School, focusing on the work produced by the Sutjeska Film in 60s and 70s which has had an extensive presence at the festival during its early period. Documentaries have always been a crucial component of Oberhausen, which played a crucially important role as champion of work from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia during from the 50s-80s, and now thanks to the festivals own archive is an important custodian of work from the region. This is especially the case with regard to former Yugoslavia, whose film and archival infrastructure was largely destroyed during conflicts in the region. The programme at Oberhausen deliberately sought to explore the history of work from Bosnia & Herzegovina, to provide an insight into life and work in the region before the traumatic recent history.

The rich history of Yugoslav cinema during this period often referred to as the 'Black Wave,' included work by such maverick directors such as Dusan Makavejev, Alexander Petrovic and Zelimar Zilnik among many others who during the late 60s and early 70s followed the regions own new wave in the early 60s made increasingly critical and darkly humorous films up until the clamp down and imprisonment of director Lazar Stojanovic in 1972. By focusing on a sole film studio, which operated along the same lines at the National Film Board of Canada, the programme presenting a fascinating cross section of work ranging from Facades (Suad Mrkonjić, Yugoslavia, 1972) a slyly subversive documentary of the preparation for 'Self-Government Congress' ironically presenting the inclusive slogans on posters with the old houses they are used to mask, to the beautiful and wordless study of a stone quarry in Heave Ho! (Vlatko Filipović, Yugoslavia, 1967) and Walking School Children (Vefik Hadžismajlović, Yugoslavia, 1966) which follows the epic 12 mile walk of rural children to get to their local school.

The programmes sketched a remarkable social history, with works made with incredible care, passion and genuine regard for the people and places which they document. Two of the directors were present at the festival, along with a representative of the Kinoteka Bosne i Hercegovine where many of the films are kept. Appearing by pure coincidence in matching red jumpers, the two directors talked movingly about the importance of the festival to their early careers, where even though their films were produced for internal exhibition often they would only have been shown at festivals such as Oberhausen. Even when dated, such as the prog-rock scored High Voltage Electricians (Ranko Stanišić, Yugoslavia, 1978) about the building of electrical pylons across the country or the cheeky and ironic Izmet Kosica's Mission (Petar Ljubojev, Yugoslavia, 1977) about the trails in rural areas of a factory recruitment officer, the works present a largely unseen side of Bosnia and Herzegovia, vividly alive, funny and moving.

I only managed to sample a few works from the international competition at the festival this year, which typically presented a broad and diverse selection of works from over 30 countries and ranging in length from 2 minutes to 37 minutes. Selected from over 4,000 submissions the international competition at Oberhausen is notoriously over subscribed and the resulting programmes, while retaining the festivals commitment to all forms of the short film, often leave people somewhat bemused by some of the films they include.

Despite this the competition included many great films – some of which I've mentioned here before in my blog on Rotterdam, such as Jim Trainor's The Presentation Theme and Duncan Cambell's Bernadette. Other stand out works included leading independent Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke's Cry Me a River, a work of remarkable subtly and emotion that follows the bitter-sweet 10 year reunion of four Chinese college students and the unresolved issues that have coloured their generation. Utilising actors familiar from his feature films, such as Platform and Still Life, this work is of comparable rigour and avoids the pitfall of other feature film makers producing under par work in the short form.

British artist Jayne Parker, whose work has been showcased at the festival in profiles and competitions in previous years, presented meticulously crafted work Trilogy: Kettle's Yard produced at the Cambridge gallery filming a performance and also sculptures from their collection. My Absolution by Russian video artist Victor Alimpiev, presents an abstracted performance, where a closely huddled group against a white screen collectively hold a note until one collapses, rigorously filmed with an attention for the textures of skin and fabric to parallel the film screen.

Charlotte Pryce presented her delicate 16mm film The Parable of the Tulip Painter and the Fly, a beautifully shot film poem. Swedish artist Saskia Holmkvist, whose work revolves around a subversion and exploration of public personae, presented In Character an ambiguous confrontation in a job interview where the the manipulation of 'neutral' interview techniques is exposed.

Amit Dutta, a remarkable Indian filmmaker who has produced a series of lyrical films drawing heavily and fantastically from Indian folk culture, presented a more sober side with Jangarh Film exploring the Indian painter Jangarh Singh Shyam's life and tragic death in 2001 when he committed suicide in a museum in Japan. Born in Central India, Jangarh was part of the Gond tribe whose wall paintings where spotted by the artist J Swaminathan when he was 17 and brought to national and international attention. The film is a loosely structured documentary starting in Jangarh's village, with conversations with his family and friends, where we learn strange details such as the origin of Jangarh name, which was taken from the national census (which in Indian is Jangarh) which was being conducted at the time of his birth. The film concentrates on Jangarh's cultural and social origins in India and avoids projections on the international community or the effects of commodification of the work by indigenous people, to focus on the surroundings and environment from which Jangarh took inspiration and lovingly decorated with his fantastic murals and wall drawings.

With the announcement of the festival awards it seems that the programmers kept the best for last, as the final competition programme included three of the main winners, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Thailand, 2009) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul which received the Grand Prize and the North Rhine-Westphalia prize, Ketamin – Hinter dem Licht (Germany, 2009) by Carsten Aschmann and True Story (USA, 2004/2008) by Robert Frank. Both Frank and Weerasethakul are excellent artists each at different stages of their career, Frank still producing arresting work after 50 years and Weerasethakul continuing his development and emergence as one of the most fascinating and continually inventive artists working with film and video at the moment (I didn't see 'Ketamin' so am unable to comment on Aschmann's work).

Other prizes went to Duncan Campbell for his film Bernadette, which is looking set to dominate festivals this year after having already been awarded at Rotterdam in January and picked up two prizes here, the Arte Prize and the International Critics’ Prize (FIPRESCI Prize).

A full list of the festival prizes can be found on the Oberhausen website.


Image: A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Guest Blogger: Oberhausen - part one by George Clark

'Weg zum Nachbarn,' which translates into English as 'The way to the neighbour,' was established as the motto of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1958, then in its fifth year. Now in its 55th year, the festival has gone through successive changes of direction, weathered protests and upheavals and championed successive generations of filmmakers and artists while retaining its core dedication to bringing film cultures from around the world together for the five days of the festival. This year was no different which a typically far ranging competition programme but also special screenings dedicated to a Sarajevo documentary studio, a leading Japanese experimental director, a Mexican ethnographic film maker and most substantially in its large thematic programme, Unreal Asia, a sustained and reflective examination of the contemporary practice in the many countries that make up the region contentiously grouped together as South East Asia.

I arrived at the festival on the first full day of screenings in time to catch the opening programme of the Unreal Asia strand. Occupying the festivals Theme strand, Unreal Asia consisted of 10 individual programmes curated by the Thailand based curators Gridthiya Gaweewong and David Teh. Assembled to reflect the contemporary practice in countries as diverse as Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam, the programme also sought to propose a series of questions or propositions for how the region of South East Asia can fruitfully be approached considering the divergent cultures, religions, languages and social and political history of an area whose grouping is a relic of British and later American military operations in the East.

Unreal Asia is the latest in a range of thematic programmes that distinguish Oberhausen from many festivals which rarely commit on this scale to such wide ranging thematic explorations. In recent years programmes have explored the parallels between European and American experimental film and their counterparts in the Soviet Union, looked at the middle east through the prism of Lebanon and reflections on successive conflicts and the relation of the cinema to the museum in the influential programme Kinomuseum. Unreal Asia proposed a similarly fascinating series of questions and proposals while also crucially presenting a wide range of work that is rarely if ever shown outside of the countries of origin.

The programmes presented many works by internationally established artists such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Emerald about traces in a defunct hotel in Bangkok and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's The Two Planet Series in which Thai farmers respond to European master paintings, Subodh Gupta's provocative performance video Pure (India, 1999), Ho Tzu Nyen's potted history the naming of Sinapore with Utama – Every Name In History is I and Dinh Q. Lê's three screen work exploring a farmers fascination with helicopters against the context of the Vietnam War. Such works were presented alongside documentaries and works produced by Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community groups often on the level of local activism.

The unnerving documentaries presented a remarkable affectation-free view of contemporary life, from the Vietnamese couple who run a dog-butchery in their back yard in Better Than Friends (Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2003), to The Longest Day (Uruphong Raksasad, Thailand, 2005) which is a portrait of an old Thai woman bored with her life and waiting for death, and the disarmingly powerful Death In Jakarta (Ucu Agustin, Indonesia, 2006) which presents the routine procedures to handle the unidentified dead in the capital city. Another stand out filmmaker in Unreal Asia for me was Amir Muhammad, whose brilliant short films present the complex issues of cultural and political identity within Malaysia with a critical humour and lightness of touch which avoids didacticism in works such as Kamunting (2002) and and Checkpoint (2002).

Finally, to end this first post I'll mention the work of Japanese experimental and documentary filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio who was honoured at the festival with the largest retrospective of his work outside of Japan. Famous for his highly influential feature film Funeral Parade of Roses (Japan, 1969) both a key work of the Arts Theatre Guild and largely known as a key inspiration for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. The sheer range of Matsumoto's work and his influential role as writer and lecturer is rarely known outside of Japan where he is along with Shuji Terayama the leading experimental film maker from the 1960s.

The real revelation of the season was the strength of his early documentary work such as the excellent Weavers of Nishijn (Japan, 1961) which depicts the traditional processes of fabric manufacturing that has existed in the region for years. Other early works included the wonderful industrial films Bicycle of Dream' (Japan, 1955) and Record of a Long White Line (Japan, 1960) whose surreal presentations of the bicycle and electrical industry including strange optical effects and camera tricks, met with utter confusion and rejection by their backers. The later work by Matsumoto was more familiar formal experiments with film ranging from his early psychedelic works such as Ecstasis: Kokotsu (Japan, 1969) and the three screen freak-out For My Crushed Right Eye (Japan 1968) to later video works such as the bizarre Mona Lisa (Japan, 1973) which superimposes Michelangelo's muse into a array of abstract landscapes and the more formal dissections of the frame in Yuragi: Sway (Japan, 1985). Mothers (Japan, 1967) was an utter anomaly, it is a globe trotting humanist and anti-war film, set to a poem by Shuji Terayama and depicts maternal relationships around the world from New York to Vietnam. For sheer audacity and unchecked ambition it couldn't be matched and providing a home for such maverick work has been a core of the festival since its inception and is one of its greatest pleasures.

Guest Blogger: Rotterdam festival blog - jury and beyond, part one by George Clark

After missing the film festival in Rotterdam last year, I was looking forward to attending again in 2009 any way I could. In the midst of figuring out how I was going to get there and where to stay I got an email inviting me to be on the jury for the Tiger Awards for Short Film. Surprised and flattered I quickly accepted before realising that I was committing myself to. The entire short film competition consists of 29 films each running anything up to 60 minutes long spread over nine individual programmes. As the first time I’d been invited to be on a jury and at Rotterdam, a festival I have attending since 2000, I was happy to watch whatever they had selected.

Competition programmes at festivals - which usually consist of a selection of titles from everything a festival shows - can often suffer from striving to be representative of all types of work produced, representing bad works at times seems to be part of this politically correct strategy! One of the most interesting things about festivals is their ability to champion and find a space for their own take on film culture, to create for a week or two a cinematic utopia where the wealth of moving image culture is not governed by the normal logistical and financial pressures of running a cinema. Often the specific character of a festival is best expressed through their special thematic strands or focuses on certain filmmakers or regions. In this regard Rotterdam is one of the most interesting festivals in the world, willing to change its format to reflect what its many programmes believe is important about moving image culture each year. Festival competition, as the most general part of a festival, can often be a stumbling block where the identity and direction of the festival is lost in a too broad selection of work, with films shoehorned into uncomfortable collections in order to fill out the required 90 minute.

Thankfully IFFR’s strong individualism and independent character permeated the nine competition programmes at this years festival - each was filled with striking, challenging works form a wide range of filmmakers. The festival presented each work individually often stopping between to talk to attending filmmakers which broke up the programmes and allowed each film to stand as an individual work. The competition consisted of works nominated by Rotterdam’s various programmers from all areas of the festival, presenting work from young to established filmmakers, from gallery artists to experimental filmmakers. On the jury with me was Tan Chui Mui, a celebrated Malaysian filmmaker whose first feature Love Conquers All (Malaysia, 2006) won a Tiger Award when it showed at Rotterdam in previous years and Maria Pallier who produces the amazing Spanish television programme Metropolis - which was recently celebrated with an exhibition at the Cornerhouse in Manchester.

In recent years with changes of director the festival has seemed to be unsure what direction to take. This edition marked the first under the confirmed leadership of Dutch director Rutger Wolfson who co-directed the festival last year on what was then a temporary basis. With time to prepare Rutger has shaped the festival with a new simplified structure of three sections which include features, shorts and performances and exhibitions under the banners Spectrum, Bright Future and Signals. Since 2005 the short film section has been lead by Peter van Hoof who has focused the short film screenings into the first half of the festival, successfully creating an intimate atmosphere within the broader festival - the Lantern and Venster venue acting as unofficial hub making it easy to bump into filmmakers, artists, curators, distributors and festival programmes for a beer or for a quick hello in the mad dash between screenings. The festival liberally defines short films as any work under 60 minutes in length - partly in response to the fact that the Tiger for feature films can be given to anything over 60 minutes - a clear sighted way to define ‘short’, a arbitrary category at the best of times and give room to filmmakers work rather than dictate what form it should take.

There were too many interesting films to go into in detail here but my particular favourites from the short competition included Deborah Stratman's O’er the land (USA, 2008) a brilliant study of American notions of freedom, the land and man’s relationship with machines. Constructed with brilliantly composed often static shots and intermittently narrated, the film builds an idiosyncratic portrait of America. At the other end of the spectrum was Jim Trainor’s virtuoso animation The Presentation Theme (USA, 2008) which builds a perverse narrative inspired by artefacts the ancient pre-Inca Peruvian culture, called the Moche. Beautifully drawn and made with sublime roughness, from the lazy animation to the over emphatic organ soundtrack and condescending but hypnotic narration. Block B by Chris Chong Chan Fui (Malaysia/Canada, 2008) consists of just two long takes of the same housing block in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, one in day time and one at night, the inhabitants visible as dots on the various walkways. The films power comes from its effortless orchestration of activity on the various floors of the tower block which our attention is subtly drawn to my the excellent sound design by Yasuhiro Morinaga. What at first appears to be a purely observed shot emerges as an intricately timed series of actions realised with an incredible attention to detail and more than a stop of good luck - especially in a magical moment when a shawl is dropped from one walkway only to land on a banister eight floors down.

To be continued...

Guest Blogger: Stephen Irwin on Clermont-Ferrand

My Animate Projects film, The Black Dog’s Progress, was selected for the Lab Competition in this year’s Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival so I went along for a couple of days to see what goes on at a festival of this scale.

Two days definitely wasn’t enough time to see the huge amount of work on show. Luckily there isn’t much else to do in Clermont-Ferrand (other than the festival it’s also famous for being the home of the Michelin tire company), so I spent most of my time in the many screening rooms and cinemas and managed to squeeze in dozens of short films.

I mainly stuck to the Lab Competition after I’d been warned against the National Competition by a veteran of the festival who wasn’t too kind about the usual selection of French films each year. As it turned out I didn’t have time anyway. There was more than enough in the five Lab programmes and in the couple of other special programmes I fitted in.

For the most part I sought out animated films that I hadn’t seen yet or had only viewed on Vimeo/YouTube. It reminded me how rarely I watch short films with hundreds of other people in the cinema. Watching shorts has become a solitary experience and one that I have control over; if I don’t like something I can skip through it or move on to the next thing, and alternatively if I love it I can play it again and again.

I was particularly keen to see Muto by Blu on the big screen after watching it repeatedly on Vimeo and it didn’t disappoint (and it quite rightly went on the win the Grand Prix in the Lab Competition).

Other inspiring animations included Stand Up by Joseph Pierce which was uncomfortable to watch and contained some of the most beautifully animated ugly images I’ve seen in ages. The same programme also included Inukshuk by Camillevis Thery. Something so detailed and perfectly animated can only be appreciated fully when projected (and even better from a 35mm print).

Also memorable was Rabbit Punch by Kristian Andrews and Cartographie 9 – La Boule d’Or by Bruno Deville, a live-action film about a bowling club and a team of pensioners which I thought was a documentary but according to the programme notes is fiction.

The quality of the films in competition was extremely high (even the ones I didn’t like), and each programme was very well put together. I thought I saw themes running through each programme but Calmin Borel who works on the Lab Competition told me that they just make sure there is a good mixture of genre, subject matter and length. They construct a programme based on the idea that it might be the only one that particular audience will see.

What impressed me the most about the festival was the size of the audiences. I arrived towards the end of the festival and all the screenings were still selling out. You have to arrive in good time and queue for at least twenty minutes to ensure you get a seat. At a couple of screenings there were even some people who couldn’t get in and were turned away.

It was nice to see several hundred people queuing up in the Maison de la Culture on Saturday afternoon to get into the Lab 4 screening that included my film, and for it to play to a packed auditorium. Plus the quality of the projection and sound was perfect which was a relief. There is obviously a lot of time and money spent on organising the festival and making sure it runs smoothly. It was a great experience to be part of it in some small way and if I get the opportunity to go again it’ll definitely be for longer.

Stephen
smalltimeinc.com
smalltimeinc.blogspot.com

Image: Clermont-Ferrand, Stephen Irwin (click on the image to see it full-size)

Guest Blogger: Clermont-Ferrand travel diary by Tal Rosner

Hello! I've just come back from Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival and was asked to write a short blog entry about it - so - here we go.

This year was the first time I visited the Festival, an extremely well-organised week, with numerous screenings in multiple venues. I arrived on the 5th day so was only there for the last part of the festival. The 3 main competitive sections were the National (France), International and Labo (Lab). My AnimateTV 2008 film, Without You, was featured in one of the 5 Labo Programmes (L2), which were all screened daily (in different venues and different times). As a spectator, I focused on the Labo screenings, which are the place to see new experimental stuff from around the world.

I found a huge variety in the material that was chosen for Labo screenings: from hand-drawn, slightly more traditional animation, via crazy CGI stuff to documentaries with no animation at all. The lengths of the individual films also varied a lot in the programmes (from 3 to 30 minutes).

Leaving my favourite films aside for a minute (I’ll get to them later) - a question that kept on surfacing during my trip to the festival, and in over-dinner discussions with the lovely Jane and Lindy (who saved the day - thank you!) was - how do you define a film as 'experimental'? Is it the fact that you haven't seen anything like it before? And if so, doesn't the definition of 'experimental' become a subjective matter?

As all of us see things with reference to the different collection of things we've seen in the past - maybe something that looks 'experimental' to person A would actually be something that person B has seen many times before. Also - does 'experimental' necessarily mean experimental in technique (i.e. the way the images are drawn, photographed or manipulated - 'imagery'), or is there perhaps another level of experimentation, which is the grammar (i.e. the way thing are constructed on the timeline - 'form'). Perhaps I'm being biased to my own interests and agenda, but I felt there wasn't enough of the latter – to me it is mandatory.

All in all though, it was an extremely positive experience. The "Film Market" was also quite fun to go through. It felt like there was a huge amount of very keen people from around the globe and that they were all there together to keep things moving in good and right directions.

My favourites (and all things I personally haven't seen the like before!) were:

REISE ZUM WALD by Jorn Staeger (Germany). A very well-edited visual essay about the German myth of trees. Crazy journey from close ups to timelapse to satellite shots exploring one simple visual motif in an extremely elegant way.

MURO by Tião (Brazil). A short film with a poetic and sometimes violent sense of film grammar, cuts and juxtapositions between 'real' and more symbolic/surreal scenes (imagine Dali in Brazil circa 2008 - but on film).

DOXOLOGY by Michael Langan (US). Very hyped American short, might not be coherent throughout but very interesting structurally and includes a shot of man dancing a waltz with a car, which was unforgettable.

Thanks for reading
Tal
talrosner.com

Image: Clermont-Ferrand, Tal Rosner. For more images visit our flickr