Eastern European films re-selected from the archive of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival
Program 2: No jokes in the class!
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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Tree Tops
- directed by Dušan Trančík, CSSR 1972, 17'
- At first sight an educational film about cement production, it gradually turns into a hilarious and subversive satire on standardized forms of filming and teaching. No jokes during class!
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Working Women
- directed by Piotr Szulkin, Poland 1978, 6'
- Produced by the "Educational Film Studio” Szulkin's series of six tableaux vivants of individual women at work shatters the promise of "emancipation through labor".
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Shunters
- directed by Jürgen Böttcher, GDR 1984, 22'
- A beautifully filmed choreography of hard physical labor in the GDR's largest freight train yard in Dresden, Winter 1984. Hardly a word is spoken, and the images become more and more telling.
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Our XXth Century
- directed by Jadwiga Zajicek, Poland 1988, 20'
- Scenes and testimonies from a shelter for homeless men in Warsaw. While the film pitches Christian charity against a cynical political system, the men's stories reveal how a crisis of society turns into individual suffering.
- 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.
