Oberhaus-Party (Part Two) (Patreon)

TV's Ken Ober (1957-2009)

Here is a second heaping helping of my reviews from Oberhausen 66. Overall, I wasn't quite as taken with these films. But I did discover a potentially interesting new filmmaker.

Further Radical (Stefano Canapa, 2020)

A sequel to an earlier piece called A Radical Film that I have not seen, Further Radical is similarly based on a pun. Aiming to return to the "roots" of the cinema, Canapa has applied thin slices of black radish to the unexposed filmstrip, resulting in direct impressions and discolorations. For Further Radical, Canapa used a similar technique but worked with the material on the optical printer. So, following the metaphor to its logical conclusion, I suppose the first film is the "raw," and this one is the "cooked." The resulting film is a rhythmic array of organic splotches and parabolic forms, diverting but without formal urgency. More irksome is the now-standard thumping washing-machine "industrial" soundtrack, which provides a repetitive ground for the highly irregular visual forms. As with many such films, Further Radical employs the soundtrack as an organizational cheat, giving the viewer something firm and familiar to mitigate the "strange" flow of images. It's becoming one of my least favorite tropes.

Latency Contemplation 6 (Seoungho Cho, 2020)

A potentially interesting film with a few too many things going on. Primarily Cho seems to be concerned with physical abstraction, in particular the pseudo-landscape produced by a still life arrangement of muslin on a tabletop. Using rack focus and multiple perspectives, Cho moves in and out of this basic set-up, potentially creating a minimalist Cézanne scenario. (Formally, Latency Contemplation 6 reminded me of Gary Hill's work at times.) But Cho manipulates the images, breaking them apart digitally so they granulate at one moment, then stutter like faulty digital TV at another. He complicates the undulating forms with superimposed horizontal lines (above) that draw and undraw themselves at intervals. And Cho caps it all of with a horn-driven symphonic remix of Benjamin Britten. The components simply don't gel. Occasionally you can get more impact when you allow the viewer for focus on a select few aesthetic ingredients. Someone should coin a pithy three-word statement about that.

Porvenir (Renata Poljak, 2020)

A quiet, modest study of a very specific place, Porvenir explores a coastal area in Chile that became a settlement for Croatian immigrants in the 1950s. At the start of the film, as we see streets and houses, it is unclear where we are, but we are fairly certain we aren't in Europe, and eventually Spanish-language signage clues us in. Poljak alternates between brief, purely indexical shots and some longer ones that display the sleepy life unfolding within this isolated corner of the world. It's a pleasant enough film, although to be honest I'd forgotten I'd seen it. Porvenir's sounds and images don't really have enough ionic charge betwixt and between them to ever make the film jump to life.

B4 & After the Studio Pt 1 (Tony Cokes, 2019)

I am not well-versed in Cokes's work. In fact, I think I've only seen one of his other pieces, Black Celebration, nearly 20 years ago. His latest is hard to evaluate. It is essentially a multicolored PowerPoint presentation that presents, slide by slide, a text describing the history of the Tompkins Square riot in 1988, its place in the gentrification of Manhattan, and more broadly the use of artists as unwitting advancemen/women in the gentrification process. Poor people are evicted to create artists' lofts and performance / museum districts, which them pave the way for high income housing. (Cf. TIFF Lightbox.) It is all interesting reading, but it started to seem familiar. Then at the end, Cokes reveals that the text is from Sharon Zukin's book Loft Living. So Cokes has taken an excerpt from a text, reproduced it in purple and orange, and backed it with a second-rate drum-and-bass soundtrack. And?

Untitled (Janet Lilo, 2019)

A small piece that seems to function less like a discrete film and more, perhaps, like a component of an installation, New Zealand artist Lilo's 4 1/2 minute video mostly focuses on a single tree in a field, shot from a single camera set-up, under varying light and atmospheric conditions. This in itself is rather seductive as a set of temporal mutations, but much like Seoungho Cho, Lilo burdens Untitled with too many variables. The images, for some reason, are bounded by a digital picture frame, which undermines the organic resonance of the tree scenes. Other objects enter the frame (see above), and it seems as if Lilo is trying out ideas rather than making firm compositional choices.

Patent Nr. 314805 (Mika Taanila, 2020)

I've seen a number of Taanila's films over the years, and they are always worth checking out, in a sort of second-tier sort of way. He has yet to make a film that really connects with me, or that I find formally or intellectually compelling enough to make big claims for. But they do display facility with his materials, and I suppose they could be seen as wry distant cousins to the Austrian avant-garde, although by comparison Taanila's work is notable for its lack of Freudian jet-propulsion. Patent Nr. 314805 is just under three minutes, and it displays the largely unseen experiments of Finnish engineer Eric Tigerstedt, who in 1914 invented optical sound. His patent was rejected because of the outbreak of World War I, effectively obscuring his achievement in the eyes of history. As a work of reclamation, Taanila's film is terse yet effective, even if a bit more context might have made for a richer overall film experience.

Pencical of Praise (Martha Rosler, 2018)

Martha Rosler is a pioneer of video art. Her works, such as Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977), and A Simple Case for Torture (1983), are classics, not only showing the potentials of the medium, but participating in the late 70s / early 80s discourses of political feminism, the critique of representation, and the use of counter-cinematic strategies to break down the boundaries between art and critical intervention. Her latest work is about Mike Pence, and it is really bad. It takes greatest (s)hits from the Trump administration, news clips we've all seen, and presents them with minimal manipulation -- some emojis, red X'es, and in one case, clips from The Great Escape. The most generous thing I can say about Pencical of Praise is that, if an artist of Rosler's intelligence can't make a better piece than this about Trump and Pence, maybe it's a sign that there's really no reason to try and fight them off with art.

Amaryllis - a study (Jayne Parker, 2020)

British filmmaker Jayne Parker's seven minute film consists of close-ups of amaryllis flowers, first a red one, then a white one. The compositions resemble off-kilter approximations of Robert Mapplethorpe's classic floral still lives; Parker's framings suggest symmetry but tend to refute it. The main problem with the film is that it doesn't move. It is quite literally a series of camera set-ups, one after the other, with no obvious editorial logic and no clear engagement with the cinematic medium, aside from the occasional tremble of the 16mm strip in the gate, or the specific grain texture. And while these are indeed concrete material properties of the medium, they hardly lessen the sensation of observing a set of images that would be better presented in a book or on a wall.

Tell Me (Azar Saiyar, 2019)

The most notable discovery of this group of films comes from Saiyar, a Helsinki-based artist, whose found-footage work Tell Me suggests a bevy of rich conceptual concerns that extend beyond the film itself. As a standalone, Tell Me is intriguing but rather minor, but it seems like the sort of film that would more fully reveal its secrets in tandem with more works by Saiyar. That's to say, it appears to be part of a much larger project. Composed from excerpts from Finnish television programs about birdwatching from the 1970s, Tell Me combines the clips' original soundtracks with Saiyar's own explanatory narration. In addition to providing context for the original broadcast of the programs, she also calls attention to the semiotics of sound and image, and how the construction of these shows serve to create a particular attitude regarding nature, humans' place within it, and by extension, a benign, curious subject, "the Finn," who takes pleasure in these natural investigations. Tell Me reminded me a bit of Dane Komljen's work, and needless to say, that's a good sign.