The Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Jared Rapfogel

The Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival) is one of the longest-running and most preeminent festivals devoted to the art of the short film. I’ve been covering the festival for Cineaste for the past decade, and have almost always focused my attention away from the central International Competition, toward the many supplemental sections. Taken together, these sections, which have proliferated in the past couple years, represent an admirable attempt to conceive of different ways to think about the form of the short film, its history, and its status during a time of continued technological and formal transformation. The 2019 event, which took place over six days in early May, marked the sixty-fifth edition of the festival, and saw the organizers further developing some of the new sections that were introduced in 2018. But for me the highlight of this year’s festival was the “Theme” section, “The Language of Attraction: Trailers between Advertising and the Avant-garde.”

Guest-curated by Cassie Blake and Mark Toscano of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Los Angeles, “The Language of Attraction” was not the most revelatory or vital of Oberhausen’s Theme sections over the past decade, nor was it without its shortcomings and limitations. But to my eyes it was a breath of fresh air, both as an antidote to some of the excessively academic, over-familiar, or conceptually top-down Theme programs of past years, as well as a welcome focus on a realm of moving-image culture that is ubiquitous but rarely explored in any depth (certainly not in a festival context). The section was also expertly balanced between programs comprising bona fide trailers of various kinds (sourced from numerous archives and collectors, albeit predominantly from the collection of the Academy Film Archive itself), and others showcasing experimental films that, in one way or another, utilize, evoke, or adopt the form of trailers (the former were assembled by Cassie Blake, the latter by Mark Toscano).

The programs showcasing actual trailers were themselves organized according to different themes: the first focused on unusual and formally unique trailers; the second on trailers trumpeting new technological innovations or promotional gimmicks; the third (and perhaps most vital) on that rarest of animals, the preview that features a female narrator rather than the authoritative male voice that dominates the vast majority of trailers to this day; and the fourth (which I sadly missed) on “Pre-show trailers advertising everything from refreshments to church-going.”

Though far from the only accomplishment of the section, it’s nevertheless worth pointing out that these programs (as well as the ones focusing on experimental films) were enormously pleasurable and engaging. The value of the trailers programs was predominantly in the social, commercial, and historical dimensions they revealed, but there were aesthetic pleasures to be had, too, especially in the first program, which highlighted the exceptions that prove the rule: trailers that fly in the face of the normally very codified and conventional formats that tend to dominate a given era. The argument for the trailer as a truly promising form for expression and experimentation is a tough sell, but some of the highlights from this first program constituted those rare examples of trailer design that aimed at more than simply compression or straightforward promotion. Hitchcock is certainly the most famous example of a filmmaker who treated his previews as short films in their own right, and Program 1 included his celebrated trailer for The Birds, which—like those for North by Northwest, Psycho, and others—trades on Hitchcock’s fame as an on-screen personality. The Birds trailer is remarkable for including (until the very end) no imagery from the film itself. Instead, it comprises a tongue-in-cheek presentation by Hitchcock himself, who sarcastically expounds upon the close relationship between human- and bird-kind (explaining for instance how pleased birds must be to donate their feathers for the cause of decorating hats, etc.).

Program 1 gathered several other trailers that notably omit any imagery from the films they’re designed to promote. These included one of my own all-time favorites: the trailer for Albert Brooks’s Real Life. Here Brooks, hosting from the comfort of his own office, declares that for the sake of razzle-dazzle the trailer will be in anaglyph 3-D, though of course the effect is lost on the audience who inevitably has no 3-D glasses (“If you happen to be in a theater that has no glasses, don’t worry, you can share in the fun too; simply turn to the person you’re sitting next to, and borrow a piece of red and blue cellophane…”). Other highlights of this bizarre category of trailers included a similar preview for This is Spinal Tap, which doubles down by not only omitting footage from the film (allegedly because the editing hasn’t been completed) but compensating by including footage from an unrelated travelogue documentary instead, a parody film about the little-known traditional Danish ritual of “cheese-rolling” (“And as the jubilant day fades into another suicide-filled Scandinavian evening, the cheese festival ends with the crowning of the King and Queen!”). A very different approach to this same category came with the trailer for John Waters’s Pink Flamingos, which replaces clips from the film with spontaneous, post-screening interviews with the audience members leaving a midnight screening in New York City. Above and beyond an illustration of a bold approach to trailer design, it offers an invaluable glimpse of 1970s New York moviegoers, a hilarious and diverse collection of often fabulously attired, unrestrainedly charismatic men and women who share their opinions pro and con (“I think John Waters has got his finger on the pulse of America, I think he’s got his thumb securely up America’s ass.”).

Certainly the most revealing of the three programs I saw devoted to trailers proper was the one entitled, “Better Seen Than Heard: The Anomaly of Female Voiceover in Trailers.” It doesn’t take a close study of the movie trailer to realize that female narrators are few and far between, and in fact it was almost hard to believe that enough existed to construct an entire program. If “Better Seen Than Heard” didn’t necessarily reveal anything we didn’t know about gendered roles in entertainment and marketing, it certainly provided an unmistakable illustration of all this, as refracted through the always amplified lens of promotional techniques. Not a single narrator in these trailers is allowed to be female purely by happenstance—instead each voice represents “womanhood” in more or less cartoonish, offensively clichéd ways. In most cases, the women heard in the trailers are coached to adopt tones of voice that come off as infantile and simple-minded, or more often absurdly sultry and sensual. In the worst offenders, the rationale is usually apparent enough—you’d hardly expect anything different from the previews for films like the Dean Martin vehicle Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957), the sex farce Three in the Attic (1968), or the softcore comedy The Stewardesses (1969). But in other cases the use of a cartoonishly sultry voice is frankly mysterious, never more so than in the bizarre case of the French/Czech animated feature Fantastic Planet (1973), whose trailer mixes clips from the film with the usual festival plaudits and press quotes, here intoned by a woman who affects a voice so soporifically deliberate and toneless that she sounds like she’s in a drug-induced stupor. It’s difficult to fathom what the distributor’s promotional department was going for, but if it was some sort of hypnotic trance state to mirror the film’s surrealism, it falls horribly flat, especially when the narrator is called upon to cast her spell by delivering such punchy prose as, “I recommend it” (a rousing affirmation courtesy of The New York Times). Much more memorable (unsurprisingly) was the trailer for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is at least self-conscious in its overbaked sultriness, with its female narrator represented on screen as a pair of abstracted, disembodied lips.

All in all, the “Better Seen Than Heard” program offered a dizzying tour of (primarily 1950s–1970s) mainstream American culture’s attitudes towards women, gender relations, sex, and other mores. Ranging from classics such as Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Lolita (both superb and innovative approaches to the trailer, albeit only glancingly related to the program’s theme), Robert Altman’s Nashville, and Elaine May’s A New Leaf (a film actually made by a female director), to sexploitation films like The Stewardesses, Malibu High, and High School Hellcats, the program also provided glimpses of several items that upended simplistic accounts of the era’s cultural landscape. Above all I have in mind the Broadway theater adaptation, Blue Denim (1959), a drama about a subject—teen pregnancy and abortion—that I would’ve thought couldn’t be touched in a mainstream Hollywood film at the time, and Lady in a Cage, which appears to be a truly deranged and nasty exploitation item starring a stocking-masked James Caan as one of several psychotics terrorizing Olivia de Havilland, who explains the title succinctly when she intones, “Help, help! I am trapped…in a small…private…elevator!”

Even beyond the presence of female narrators, these trailers painted a portrait of a popular culture responding in ways both sophisticated and retrograde to a growing feminist movement. From this perspective, perhaps the most memorable and charming of all the coming attractions in the program was the U.S. trailer for the West German sex education documentary, Helga (1967). Once again, the trailer omits any footage from the film (since “there may be young children in the audience”), instead offering—like the Pink Flamingos trailer—a selection of apparently spontaneous interviews with men and women on the street (and on the beach, at bus stops, and in bars and clubs). The responses to the male interviewer’s questions about sex education and birth control are priceless, and the trailer culminates with an unexpectedly sharp response from a scantily clad waitress at a cocktail bar, who, having declared that the birth control pill is the “greatest thing since popcorn,” responds to the interviewer’s follow up question, “Do you have any reason for this?,” with “Well, sure, because I believe in planned parenthood.” It’s a hilariously on-point and earnest concluding note for a trailer that’s ostensibly trying to appeal to the audience’s salacious nature.

My only major caveat regarding this part of the Theme section was the paucity of international trailers. Aside from a handful of exceptions—a preview for Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Godard’s Contempt (another masterpiece of trailer design), Black Orpheus, and The Earrings of Madame de…—all the trailers were from English-speaking territories. No doubt this was primarily a matter of the scope of the section and of access to the prints themselves. But it nevertheless represented a conspicuous absence, and an avenue for further research.

The flip side of the “Language of Attraction” section—and a crucial element of the section’s ambitions—were the programs that explored the various ways independent and experimental filmmakers have played with the form and conventions of trailers. Most interesting, to my mind, was the multi-artist program, “Viewer Discretion Advised: Appropriating the Language of Trailers.” This screening gathered together films by a wide variety of international experimental filmmakers past and present, including Dean Snider, Tom Rubnitz, Martha Colburn, Ivan Zulueta, George Kuchar, Takeshi Murata, Kent Lambert, Motoharu Jônouchi, Bruce & Norman Yonemoto, and others. Toscano’s conception of what qualified as evocations of the trailer format was quite broad, sometimes a bit mystifyingly so, but for the most part his selections impressively pushed beyond the most literal connections to the form, finding traces of the “trailer spirit” in ways that shed an interesting light not only on the experimental films in the program but also retroactively on the trailers themselves, suggesting what can happen if we look beyond their intended purposes and separate them from the feature films they’re ostensibly designed to promote.

The program ricocheted between films that worked explicitly with the form or modus operandi of the trailer, and others whose ties to the coming attraction were more subtle or perhaps even unconscious (spiritual cousins to the form, in a sense). The films whose connections to the trailer were unmistakable broke down into two different categories: found footage films that took feature-length films as their raw material but that justified their inclusion in this context by condensing the features into radically compressed short films; and other works that effectively created their own coming attractions from scratch. Highlights from the former category included Ikiru Wipes (Sarah Biagini, 2011), Frank Stein (Ivan Zulueta, 1972), Condensed Movie #1 (Kent Lambert, 2002), and The End—A Mexican Movie (Annalisa Quagliata, 2016). Each of these films condense the found features in extremely different ways. In Ikiru Wipes, Biagini orchestrates a densely layered and visually spectacular ode to a particular cinematic technique, which the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was famously fond of: the optical wipe. Taking her lead from Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), she extracts every instance of an optical wipe throughout the feature film, reprinting them multiple times and using them as the raw material for further wipes, and piling all of them on top of a single scene in Ikiru that itself represented a virtual symphony of optical wipes—the famous passage in which a group of women seeking to drain a toxic cesspool in their neighborhood are punted from one bureaucrat to another. 

Frank Stein—by the great Ivan Zulueta (Arrebato)—is a more linear example of the compression of a feature. Filming James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) directly off a television screen, Zulueta then refilmed that material, mostly speeding up the footage dramatically, but alternating the sped-up passages (which ultimately condense the seventy-minute Frankenstein into a three-minute short film) with brief freeze frames and slow-motion passages. Zulueta at once compresses the film into a vertiginous headlong rush and poetically isolates certain images, gestures, and expressions, transforming Frankenstein into an (even more) feverish dream.

Condensed Movie #1 similarly whittles a feature (independent Iowa filmmaker Dan Nannen’s Silverwings, from 2000) down to only ten minutes, but Lambert’s film is marked less by what’s emphasized than by what’s omitted: namely, every instance of spoken dialogue. What remains (from what presumably was a fairly talky film) is a truly uncanny compilation of interstitial moments: awkward glances, meaningful looks, and above all a constant flow of the drawn-in breaths that precede speech. The result is to conjure up the illusion of characters who communicate entirely through nonverbal means: precisely via glances and strange forms of respiration. Though the source movie looks to be a profoundly silly and amateurish one, Lambert’s film somehow avoids easy mockery, instead creating a world that’s gently comic but also strangely mysterious and obscure.

The End uses some of these same techniques to more socially and politically lacerating ends. Annalisa Quagliata’s source is a 1934 Mexican film entitled Two Monks—in condensing it to two-and-a-half minutes, she reduces it to a series of images of women resisting the force or violence of men. The film becomes a nonstop succession of gestures of aggression on the part of the male characters and gestures of defiance and struggle on the part of the women. The result is a profoundly powerful work that’s at once deeply disturbing in its depiction of ritualized, endemic violence, and heartening in its emphasis on female resistance.

The best trailers marshal the power of disconnected, fragmented images and gestures to stimulate the imagination in ways that the inevitably literal-minded, overdetermined final product rarely manages to achieve. It’s this quality of trailers that many experimental filmmakers have seized upon as a way of bridging the gap between commercial cinema—with its comparatively high production values and wealth of vivid images, but predominantly conventional mentality—and experimental cinema, which after all is often precisely about freeing imagery from the shackles of conventional narrative structures or logic. This connection was apparent in the faux trailers of Damon Packard and Tom Rubnitz, but perhaps even more so in one of the “Viewer Discretion Advised” highlights: Bruce & Norman Yonemoto’s Vault (1984). Vault was among the selections whose connection to the coming attraction wasn’t a literal or obvious one, but its presence was important, and not only because the Yonemotos’s video works are all too rarely screened. Ostensibly a narrative work, Vault resembles a made-for-TV film of the 1980s in its production values, its visual and acting styles, and its milieu. An incongruous love story between (according to its distributor EAI’s Website) “a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter,” it plays out amid a bizarre mix of locations, including a concert hall, a track and field venue, and a Texas oil field. Aside from combining conventional TV movie settings and characters that wouldn’t normally coexist within a single film, Vault subjects its melodramatic narrative to a number of destabilizing and distancing techniques, above all an abstraction and fragmentation that, especially in this context, do bring to mind the coming attraction. Though it resembles a conventional narrative in many ways, each of the scenes or interactions seem to have been extracted from a larger whole, unmoored from their surrounding narrative infrastructure so that their emotional import and symbolic power appear in bold relief. This abstraction gives access to layers of meaning—both internal and external—that would be lost when subsumed into a more conventionally structured and paced whole, a phenomenon that is arguably equally true of bona fide trailers, which intentionally concentrate a movie’s drama but also inadvertently underline pop cultural attitudes, techniques, and politics.

Though I’ve chosen to focus here on the Theme section, I’d be remiss not to mention some of the other dimensions of the festival. Among the recently inaugurated sections, I did attend two of the three programs in the “re-selected” category, a section based on the curator Tobias Hering’s hands-on research into the festival’s own archive. Unlike most other film festivals, Oberhausen has amassed a vitally important archive over the years, thanks in large part to its longstanding policy of acquiring film prints of every film awarded a prize at the festival. The concept of “re-selected” is not simply to present films from the archive, but to emphasize the fact that each print “has had a unique itinerary, traces of which can be found in the archive as well as on the print itself.” Insofar as the section attempts to emphasize the material nature of individual film prints (the medium by which cinema was shown and circulated for most of its history), and to shed light on particular films by diving into the archival paper materials that have accrued around them over the years, “re-selected” is an admirable project, especially considering how apt even highly informed scholars, critics, and filmmakers are to consider films apart from their historical and material contexts. And indeed, the concept underlying the section bore fruit in many ways in the two programs I attended. I’ll focus here on the first, which paired Robert Nelson’s classic experimental film Oh Dem Watermelons (1965) with a film that, to me, was much less familiar: the Mexican film La fórmula secreta (1965), by Rubén Gámez. Both films were well worth seeing (or re-seeing), and if they were a strange pair in many ways, the context into which they were placed justified the juxtaposition. As it happens, they were each the recipient of an unusual prize in the festival’s early days: beginning with the twelfth edition in 1966, an award entitled “Prize for the Misjudged Film” was bestowed on one film each year: Oh Dem Watermelons was the inaugural award winner, while La fórmula secreta enjoyed the honor two years later. As Hering pointed out in his introduction and program notes, this relatively whimsical award had a lasting effect insofar as Oberhausen at the time added prints of all the award-winning films (the “Misjudged” included) to the festival’s permanent collection. Part of the “re-selected” section’s purpose is to draw attention to the ways in which decisions like these play a critical role in affecting a film’s reception and historical trajectory, with collections like Oberhausen’s often sheltering a particular work from oblivion by ensuring that prints remain accessible and that the films remain a part of critical and scholarly discussion. Oh Dem Watermelons and La fórmula secreta are dissimilar in some ways—Nelson’s film explores racist tropes through the lens of a San Francisco Bay Area, Beat-inflected irreverence, while Gámez’s attack on capitalism channels the unsettling surrealism of Buñuel—but they share a quality of unsparing cultural criticism, and an approach that fuses anger with humor. And in the context of “re-selected,” the pairing sheds light on a particular moment in time, when these two films were produced in their very different cultural contexts, and when both were deemed unworthy of notice by the official Oberhausen juries.

Last but not least, 2019 saw the second installment of Labs, an invaluable section devoted to the phenomenon of the artist-run lab movement, which has played an enormous role in preserving photochemical film as a feasible medium for filmmakers and artists, as well as fostering an international community of experimental filmmakers and enthusiasts. This year, the section showcased an entirely new set of labs: the Baltic Analog Lab in Riga, Latvia; the Double Negative Collection in Montreal; LABOBxL in Brussels, Belgium; LaborBerlin; Australia’s Nanolab; and SPAC CELL in Seoul, South Korea. Just like last year, however—and somewhat in keeping with the “re-selected” section, in which the context became almost as important as the individual films themselves—the section’s curator, Vassily Bourikas was at pains to clarify the methodology of the programming and the cultural, historical, and structural factors that help produce the films emerging from each lab. Regarding the selection criteria, all the films included in the three programs dated from the last two-and-a-half years, ensuring that the section represented, in Bourikas’s words, “not a history of the labs but the present.” Perhaps even more importantly, Bourikas emphasized the differences between each lab—differences that stem from the specific histories of each country, and consequently the kinds of equipment and expertise that developed in each place—as well as the importance of the international community formed by the various labs, both in terms of artistic support and the sharing of technical knowledge. The Labs section continues to represent an important snapshot of a vital dimension of contemporary independent filmmaking.

The sections I’ve focused on here represent only part of the landscape of the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. The greatest strength of the festival is its multiplicity, its determination to approach the short film from diverse directions and frameworks. Particularly important from this view are sections such as “Archives,” which provides the opportunity for various international film archives to present recently preserved or rare works from their collections; the various “MuVi” screenings, which consider the contemporary music video as a form of short filmmaking that deserves a place in the festival; and the “Distributors” component, wherein a selection of experimental film distributors are invited to curate programs from their catalogues (usually focusing on works from the past year or so). Seen as a whole, its different sections bring together a wide variety of curatorial voices, and create a mosaic of perspectives, from the historical to the contemporary, the individual to the collective, and the aesthetic to the sociopolitical, as well as focusing attention on the role of archives, distributors, and film labs in determining how films are created and disseminated. Ultimately, Oberhausen is distinguished by its concerted and rigorous efforts not only simply to showcase films new and old, but also to think seriously about the nature and different dimensions of a particular cinematic form.

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

Jared Rapfogel, a Cineaste Associate, is film programmer at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1