Oberhausen (Part III) (Patreon)

ABOVE: Uber housing, Pittsburgh, PA

So this is the last batch of short films I watched as part of Oberhausen 66. This may be a tedious exercise for my handful of readers, but I wanted to do it as an aide memoire, since it's always the case that I eventually forget about several of the films I see.

Camera Trap (Chris Chong Chan Fui, 2019)

A brief conceptual work jointly commissioned by the Smithsonian and the Hutan-Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Program in Borneo, Camera Trap combines images from Eadweard Muybridge's classic animal locomotion experiments with contemporary footage shot by digital "camera traps" positioned throughout the animal preserve. The resulting work shows both the timelessness of the natural world, as well as the changes in ways that scientists choose to observe wild animals. Problem is, Chong's method consists mainly of semi-random superimpositions -- an owl over an elephant, a tiger over a wild boar, etc. -- that offers no clear perspective on the collected material. It demonstrates an idea without providing any particularly compelling aesthetic solution.

Hard, Cracked the Wind (Mark Jenkin, 2019)

Jenkin's feature debut Bait was extremely promising, a strong indication that this strange auteur from Cornwall would soon be a significant new voice in contemporary British cinema. He has made a number of short films, although Hard, Cracked the Wind is the first one I've seen. Bait led several folks to make Guy Maddin comparisons, with its use of outdated film technology and its roiling Oedipal melodrama. We can now add another element to the comparison, since Hard, Cracked the Wind, like so many of Maddin's short films, feels ever so much like a fully-formed narrative feature, condensed through gesture, montage, and genre implication.

The film begins at an open mic night for Cornish poetry, which serves as a clever passkey for understanding Jenkin's aesthetic. Like the Cornish language itself, Jenkin's cinema is an earnest attempt to reclaim a lost tradition, to identify the creative potentials that remain there but have been passed by in our culture's fetish for the new. What at first seems to be a story of a one night stand, or a portrait of writer's block, quickly evolves into a ghost story, as Jenkin quickly traces the movement of a cursed object -- language itself. Highly recommended.

Less Lethal Fetishes (Thirza Cuthand, 2019)

Part essay film, part diary film, Cuthand's newest film is a shrewd examination of the intersections of desire, power, and politics. She begins by describing a scene she witnessed at a sex club, wherein the bottom of a BDSM couple was wearing a gas mask. This turned her on, but she wasn't sure why. So she began introducing gas masks into her photographic and video work, some of which was selected for the Whitney Biennial. But soon after her acceptance, word came out that several artists were pulling their work from the exhibition to protest the presence of Warren Kanders, a tear gas manufacturer, on the museum's Board of Trustees. Cuthand, a Canadian First Peoples artist, describes her ambivalence about the situation, since this was the highest-profile show of her career, and her work had an ironic if unexpected connection to the issue at hand. Cuthand articulates the problem with self-deprecating humor, but raises vital issues regarding forms of activism as being inextricably linked with forms of often-unexamined privilege.

Pomp (Katrina Daschner, 2020)

Oberhausen featured an entire suite of films by Daschner this year, but unfortunately I missed them. Based on Pomp, which is the eighth part of an ongoing series, I made a big mistake. Equal parts Urlike Ottinger, Ericka Beckman, Matthew Barney, Busby Berkeley, and Sara Cwynar, Pomp is a stark performance film conducted in total silence, combining close-ups of champagne fountains and elegant blue velvet curtains with a group of surrealist dancing girls, made up to look like warped versions of "trophies." They are gold and silver, they pee themselves with glitter, they form vaguely obscene star patterns with their legs, and yet they promise a form of absolute opulence, a state of commodity-fetish collectability. Who are these women? Are they alive? Have they ever spoken? Clearly I need to go back and find out how this "story" began.

Shepherds (Teboho Edkins, 2020)

Edkins was most recently featured in the Berlinale with his feature-length documentary Days of Cannibalism, about the influence of Chinese entrepreneurs on African life. Shepherds, which won the Oberhausen prize for Best Documentary, is a well-made but somewhat formally conventional profile of a group of men currently doing time in a Lesotho prison for what amounts to cattle rustling. As several of the men explain, having a cow in Lesotho means survival as well as prestige. Without cattle, there's no guarantee you can eat or raise a crop. So people are always stealing cows, and if they are caught the penalties are harsh. (Some received sentences of up to 10 years.) Before Edkins' camera, these ordinary men describe their lives before jail, the difficulties of life behind bars, and their many regrets. It's a compelling enough film, mostly because the subjects are intelligent and charismatic. Solid, well-made, but hardly groundbreaking.

The Seismic Form (Antoinette Zwirchmayr, 2020)

Body parts poking out from volcanic ash. Naked people strewn across a rocky landscape. Boa constrictors. Naked people posing around an empty sunlit castle. All set to quotations from Jean Baudrillard. I have mildly appreciated some of Zwirchmayr's films in the past, but I have watched this twice and I have no idea what it is supposed to be doing. It was not enjoyable on a surface level, nor did it strike me as conceptually intriguing. If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears. Sorry to this film.

Untitled Sequence of Gaps (Vika Kirchenbauer, 2020)

Although this film does not entirely "hang together," that is sort of the point. Kirchenbauer has composed a work that is precisely about spaces between cognition, the palpable sense that there are forces around us to which we do not have direct access. In this regard, she is using the parts of the spectrum invisible to the naked eye -- microwaves, infrared rays, ultraviolet rays, etc. -- as a metaphor for the lasting impact of trauma. That's to say, the traumatized subject carries a psychic shadow within her or himself, and the fact that they do not have direct access to that material makes it no less real. If I have a certain discomfort with Untitled Sequence, it's that it's a bit more "writerly" than I'd like. I think Kirchenbauer has some striking images, but she tends to hold them up a bit too much with her narration, so at times the image track feels like an illustration of theoretical points organized before the fact. Nevertheless, this is significant work, and Kirchenbauer is undoubtedly a filmmaker to keep an eye on.