Eastern European films re-selected from the archive of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival
Program 1: Unstable ground
In his seminal book Film as Subversive Art (1974), American film curator Amos Vogel dedicated one chapter to "Subversion in Eastern Europe". There he writes: "Unable to pose questions head-on, the artist is forced into allegory, metaphor, and indirectness ‒ secret communications to be decoded by the viewer." One of Vogel's main sources to see films from Eastern Europe was the Short Film Festival Oberhausen in West Germany which he regularly visited throughout the 1960's. Providing a platform for films from Eastern Europe had been an Oberhausen trademark and Vogel's description of a high art of subversion corresponded with how films from socialist countries were typically perceived by Western audiences: coded messages, hidden meanings, silent whispers, subtle satire.
The program presents eight Eastern European films from the Oberhausen archive which won festival awards in the 1970's and 1980's, a period which brought about political landslides and fostered a global sense of crisis that we are still dominated by today. Revisiting these films is an invitation to enjoy a critical and exciting era of filmmaking in Eastern Europe, to double-check assumptions about an era whose historical perception is often cluttered with clichés, and to find out if we can still read the codes.
The program is part of the three-year archive project re-selected at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, curated by Tobias Hering.
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Block
- directed by Hieronim Neumann, Poland 1982, 9'
- Everyday events in a dollhouse called home ‒ banal, grotesque and disturbing, seen by a camera for which walls don't exist.
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Computer Games
- directed by A. Sideljnikov, USSR 1987, 30'
- A sobering resumé of disasters caused by great masterplans, here the draining of the Aral Sea in central Asia. While the films "futuristic" gimmicks now look funnily antic, its critical message is more urgent than ever.
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The Event
- directed by Hieronim Neumann, Poland 1987, 11'
- In a village, the soil starts to bulk from something crawling below the surface. While roads turn into dams and wooden houses turn concrete, the villagers go about their business as usual.
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Microphone
- directed by G. Shkliarevskij , USSR 1989, 19'
- One year after the nuclear desaster of Chernobyl, the film gives voice to people living in farming villages at the edge of the quarantine zone. A rarely shown, shattering document of a turning point in the perestroijka era.
- Re-selected is a collaboration with Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in the framework of Archive außer sich, in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of The New Alphabet, a HKW project supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media due to a ruling of the German Bundestag.
