Last Festival on Earth: The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2021 (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Jared Rapfogel

The 2020 edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen—scheduled as it was for the very beginning of May, scant weeks after COVID-19 brought the world to a standstill—was one of the first major film events forced to migrate into the virtual sphere. It did so with impressive—indeed almost miraculous—success and grace. But few among us imagined (or could bear to imagine) at the time that a similar fate would befall the festival a full year later. With the numbers in much of Germany spiking this past spring, and the festival’s organizers already fully committed to embracing the increased accessibility and other possibilities offered by the model of a hybrid physical/virtual festival, this year’s edition ended up inspiring a vivid sense of déja vu, with all in-person, theatrical screenings canceled in favor of a second annual online festival. Once again, this came with an undeniable feeling of loss, thanks to the sacrifice not only of the theatrical experience but also of the kinds of personal connections, discussions, and exchanges of ideas that can’t be fully replicated online (despite the festival’s concerted efforts in this direction, via the creation of virtual “spaces” where discussion and conversation were encouraged). On the other hand, the organizers’ experience with the 2020 edition, and the twelve months they were able to use to prepare for, conceptualize, design, and develop an online component of this year’s event, were put to good use—the 2021 edition was a model example of a virtual festival.

One striking difference between Oberhausen 2020 and 2021 was that this year the impact of COVID was felt not only in the festival’s format but also in the films themselves. The pandemic reared its head—more or less explicitly—in numerous films, producing a more than usually vivid impression of the festival as a mirror held up to contemporary reality. The presence of the pandemic on screen also fostered an extraordinary sense of unity among filmmakers the world over (without descending into the kinds of unexamined, class-blind assumptions that infected certain realms of the cultural sphere, in which commentators treated the experience of working from home, living in solitude, and finding oneself with more time to consume cultural products than usual, as universal, as if millions upon millions of people were not still hard at work in hospitals, groceries, public transportation, and so on).

It may have been a textbook case of psychological projection, but I swear that the pandemic manifested even in the noncontemporary sections of Oberhausen—for instance, the Theme section, which this year focused on “Solidarity as Disruption,” or the Profiles which surveyed the careers of artists Baloji, Melika Bass, Marie Lukáčová, and Salla Tykkä—insofar as many of the films selected displayed a quality of interiority, adopted a melancholy tone, or centered around a particular dwelling or location. Of course, it stands to reason that the minds of film programmers, as well as filmmakers, would be affected and (consciously or otherwise) guided by the realities and traumas of the past year.

Among the films that explicitly reflected the pandemic, perhaps the most explicit was Last Man (Dana Levy, 2020), which combined sound and imagery from the 1964 postapocalyptic Vincent Price film, The Last Man on Earth, with security camera footage recorded during the height of lockdown, depicting streets, intersections, plazas, and business districts in cities around the world—locations normally teeming with human activity, now rendered all but deserted. The conceit of the film—comparing the reality of the spring of 2020 to a postapocalyptic zombie film—was not exactly revelatory in its originality or perceptiveness. But personally—as someone who did have the luxury of working from home, and therefore didn’t step foot outside my south Brooklyn neighborhood for several months at the height of the pandemic—I was taken aback by how powerfully the film brought home the profound and surreal transformation of the urban landscape wrought by COVID-19, a spectacle that remained largely theoretical for those who were able to shelter in place. The catastrophically depopulated cityscapes, the muddy quality of the footage, the blank gaze of the security cameras, not to mention Vincent Price’s theatrical but resonant voice, all combined to conjure an indelible depiction of a world whose gears have come grinding to a halt, in ways that until this past year seemed like the stuff of dystopian fantasy.

Other films reflected the events of the past year in different ways—through whimsical mythologizing [Marja Helander’s Shelter (2020), a contemporary analogue to a Spanish flu-era legend, in which a woman buries herself in order to outwit COVID-19, embodied by a young child]; structuralist gestures [Siegfried A. Fruhauf’s Distance Film (2020), whose one hundred frames of 35mm film equal 6.25 feet, the distance we’ve all been at pains to keep between ourselves for the past year-plus]; or visual/performative exercises: in Photowalk (unterirdischer Film 1/4) (2020), frequent Oberhausen participant Peter Miller and longtime Oberhausen staff member Eva Hegge stroll around the town’s streets—a bittersweet sight for regular festival attendees—taking turns snapping photographs which comprise the film’s visual track, while the soundtrack features their running commentary. Photowalk (presented, alongside Distance Film, in the “Conditional Cinema” section) is not only a witty and resourceful response to the cancellation of the in-person festival, but also a surprisingly rich and formally stimulating film in its own right, an unassuming essay on the relationship between image and sound, perspective and space, and above all presence and absence, that gracefully brought the city of Oberhausen into play even though the festival was again detached from a physical location.

The festival was dotted with other works that may not have literally reflected the events of the past year, but exuded a sense of solitude and ritual that certainly resonated in special ways. I’m thinking, for instance, of the films of Melika Bass, one of the filmmakers showcased as part of the Profiles section. Bass is a Chicago-based artist whose films are remarkably (and excitingly) difficult to pigeonhole. At first glance, they appear too invested in storytelling, set and costume design, and character to fit comfortably into an experimental film context, but their near total lack of narrative momentum and the sheer strangeness of their preoccupations and atmospheres set them decidedly apart from most narrative shorts. Films like Songs from the Shed (2008), Shoals (2011), and Waking Things (2012) all find Bass conjuring into existence mysteriously hermetic miniature worlds, anchored in circumscribed settings (a decrepit shack, a rural sanatorium, an isolated estate) where a small set of characters carry out enigmatic but carefully detailed rituals and tasks. In some ways the films channel silent cinema—featuring little to no dialogue, and a proclivity towards title cards—but the visual language is closer to experimental cinema: fractured, fragmentary, mysterious, evocative but withholding. Perhaps the closest analogue would be David Lynch’s Eraserhead, a parallel that emerges especially in the surreal theatricality of Songs from the Shed, which takes place largely within a shed that’s revealed from the outside to be a tiny, freestanding structure lit by stage lights; in Shoals’ flirtation with body horror; and in general via Bass’s exquisite and carefully crafted sound design. But Bass’s sensibility is very much her own, thanks to her distinctive preoccupation with enigmatic communities, power dynamics, confinement, and the carrying out of simple physical tasks.

Bass’s most recent film, Creature Companion (2018), is both closely related to her earlier work and in some ways an intriguing departure. Once again, she sets her sights on an uncanny household, a modest suburban home populated by two women whose relationship is unspecified—the film begins with one of the two (Selma Banich) arriving at the doorstep of the other (Penelope Hearne), apparently returning after an absence—and who engage in various unusual physical activities: contorting their faces, engaging in peculiar exercises, climbing a tree, and so on. Since the women perform these tasks silently, Creature Companion exists in a largely nonverbal dimension, approaching the realm of the dance or performance film (a quality emphasized by the actors’ credits, which read “Performed by”). But what distinguishes Creature Companion even more decisively from Bass’s earlier films is its comparatively optimistic, liberatory tone: the women’s activities gradually evolve from solitary and—in Banich’s case—vaguely onanistic exercises to rituals that they perform together. Though the women never speak to each other, they seem to develop an increasing trust and shared freedom. Unlike in the earlier films, there’s no male or other dominating figure involved, and ultimately the protagonists even escape the house, wandering off into the neighborhood (while the camera shakes loose from its previously static posture, a subtly momentous filmic choice). Creature Companion explores a particular relationship with great sensitivity, but does so by charting an expressive path entirely its own, apart from the overly familiar and literal trappings of conventional narrative progression or psychological development. 

Of course the past year wasn’t defined solely by the pandemic. The social and political transformations that convulsed the world—in parallel to and in many ways amplified, fueled, and shaped by the pandemic—were very much in evidence throughout the various sections of the festival as well. COVID-19 wasn’t even the only deadly cataclysm to inspire work by committed filmmakers: the Goethe-Institut Lebanon presented a two-part program—entitled “Prophecies from the Sea”—that not only showcased films by Lebanese artists past and present but included several pieces directly related to or inspired by the 2020 ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut. 

This year’s “Theme” section—“Solidarity as Disruption”—engaged with issues relating to labor, economic migration, social responsibility, public and private space, and the forms and assumptions of mass media. The five-part section was international in scope and encompassed both historical and contemporary films, but the selection skewed decisively towards films made in the former Yugoslavia between the late 1960s and early 1980s. In the context of Oberhausen this orientation represented a fairly well-trodden path—the festival has a long and important tradition of showcasing this era of Yugoslavian cinema, both during the time when the films were made, and via retrospective “Theme” sections in recent years—but it’s difficult to complain given how rich the region’s cinema is and how underrecognized on this side of the Atlantic.

In the words of the curators, Aleksandra Sekulić and Branka Benčić, the program was intended to “reactivate the resources of cinema in search of a new social infrastructure of solidarity.” A major dimension of the program’s ambition was recontextualization: Sekulić and Benčić’s selection was designed to recontextualize certain films that have been presented at Oberhausen in the past (including “classics” by Vlatko Gilic, Krsto Papic, and Želimir Žilnik), while many of the films themselves generate new contexts through which to view public space, archival materials, and so on. Ironic, then, that the program itself became recontextualized due to world events. Designed to take place theatrically in 2019, “Solidarity as Disruption” underwent its own transformation thanks to the pandemic; its vision of a potential transformation of social relationships and structures was pre-empted—and cast in a new light—by the unforeseen transformations wrought with such suddenness by COVID-19.

The transformed context for the program was especially conspicuous when it came to the films in Program 4—“Performative gestures”—devoted to exploring the idea of public space. The hands-down highlight here was Neša Paripović’s N.P. 1977 (1977), a sublimely straightforward, blank-faced record of a very unusual “performance.” The film is a kind of human perpetual motion machine in which, for twenty-two (silent) minutes a stoic, expressionless man strides through the urban landscape of Belgrade, ignoring the usual impediments that—by design or accident—normally dictate how we move about a city: in his unhurried but relentless forward motion, he scales fences, climbs walls, jumps between buildings, crosses highways, traverses ledges, drops from overhangs, and so on, all with a palpable (if obscure) sense of purpose but without calling undue attention to himself (not that his self-possession necessarily prevents bewildered stares from puzzled bystanders). N.P. 1977 is a strange combination of silent comedy and conceptual performance. It’s a provocative essay on how public space is designed and constructed, on the various architectural strategies for controlling, limiting, and directing people’s movements. But the brilliance of the film is that its tactic for exploring these ideas is via the liberating and comedy-tinged spectacle of a figure who calls attention to these architectural strategies by blithely ignoring them (he calls to mind Creature Companion’s protagonists, who similarly put their environment to new and highly personal uses, cavorting on the roof of their house or scaling a bus stop pole). N.P. 1977’s focus on the uses and abuses of public space would always be timely, but it had a very particular impact seen in the light of 2020—a year that brought increased awareness of the ways in which public space can be structured to repress certain segments of the population or control political expression, and that transformed all public spaces into sites of danger and anxiety.

“Solidarity as Disruption” featured several films that reflected the destructive impact of economic forces on the lives of individuals and families, and depicted the experiences of migrant workers: Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX (2011), by the Dutch group, Chto Delat Collective, as well as several works that represented the extraordinary tradition of short-form documentary filmmaking that flourished in Yugoslavia in the second half of the twentieth century: Krsto Papic’s The Special Trains (Specijalni vlakovi, 1972), Želimir Žilnik’s The Unemployed (Nezaposleni ljudi, 1968), and Vlatko Gilic’s Love (Ljubav, 1972). 

Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX was one of the major discoveries of the festival, thanks in large part to its stylized, antinaturalistic approach and refreshingly mischievous tone—it’s a film that confronts a profoundly thorny subject while avoiding even a whiff of self-serious earnestness. The film charts the chain of events that ensue when a family of illegal immigrants takes refuge in a Dutch art museum, a situation the Chto Delat Collective uses to spin a savagely funny satire on the hypocrisy, blind privilege, and casual callousness of Western societies in general, and of the affluent, cultured classes in particular. Rather than depict the story naturalistically, the film takes the form of a “songspiel” in the tradition of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The acting, set design, and blocking are all hyperstylized, while the action is punctuated by a musical commentary: a succession of songs delivered by a “chorus” of museum attendants (whose nervous confusion and anxiety in the face of a situation that challenges both their training and their presumed tolerance is particularly funny). Museum Songspiel’s Brechtian theatricality manifests not only in the performance style and songs, but in the mise en scène: with the immigrant family having taken refuge in an atrium-like space called The Eye, which is flanked by the rooms in which most of the drama plays out, the film swings back and forth from one side of The Eye to the other, the refugee family literally caught in the middle (where they’re largely ignored, and, thanks to the soundproof walls, rendered voiceless).

Among the Yugoslavian works, I’d seen the Papic and Žilnik films before in other contexts, but Love was a revelation. Like so many of the short Yugoslavian documentaries of the period, its conception of documentary is a broad one. Its protagonist is a laborer hard at work on the remote construction site of a massive new bridge, and the film depicts the “conjugal visit” of his wife, who brings him a meal which they share together during his lunch hour. But Love exists in a very different realm from that of the synch-sound/handheld camera–style of contemporaneous French or North American cinéma verité. Gilic, like many of his colleagues at the time, adopts a much more self-consciously staged, expressionistic, and stylized approach. In documenting the bridge rising breathtakingly high above an isolated valley, he achieves a graphically heightened vision of the spectacle of infrastructure that verges on sci-fi. And when the worker is informed of his wife’s visit and embarks on the long, slow, insect-like descent from the heights (by way of an impossibly tall ladder), the film’s tone veers into the territory of Tati, if not the blackly comic dehumanization of Kafka.

Only halfway through the twenty-four-minute film does the protagonist finally make it back to earth, and only at that point do we get a real look at him, does he become an individual. Gilic suggest that the process of becoming rehumanized, of emerging from the dehumanization of this kind of industrial labor, is a slow and laborious one. And the last act of the film—the well-appointed picnic in the midst of a desolate landscape, an image of humanity in the void—suggests Samuel Beckett. At the risk of overreaching for reflections of the past year and a half, the image of devoting oneself to something as quietly dignified as a picnic in an environment as inhuman and foreboding as Love’s construction site felt extremely apropos—almost like a metaphor for a film festival staged in the midst of a global pandemic.

For further information on the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, visit here.

Jared Rapfogel is the film programmer at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

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