Short Film Days Oberhausen – Political Use

The international short film days Oberhausen are the oldest short film festival in the world. They came to an end on Sunday. With Madeleine Bernstorff and Susannah Pollheim as the new festival director after saying goodbye to Lars Henrik Gass. In her speech on the opening of the 71st edition of the festival in the Oberhausen Lichtburg last Tuesday, Bernstorff only stripped the progress of the predecessor and the political quarrels as a result of an anti-Israel-motivated festival boycott campaign. It seemed more important to her to reflexively question visual habits and to search for empty spaces. As young cinema enthusiasts who changed between film history, activism and artistic practice, she noticed, for example, the lack of women in cinematic documents to Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on the authoritarian character. In the empty cinema hall, she still addressed this with a high -red head – a detail that would not have been noticed in the protective darkness.

It was like a thread: the question of the psychological and social requirements for conformity and opportunism were at the center of the official opening on Wednesday morning. Under the title “Who will be a fascist?” The social and cognitive scientist Emilie A. Caspar (Gent), the psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala (London) as well as the artists Artur żmijewski (Warsaw) and Rod Dickinson (Bristol) discussed on the podium. The starting point was the essay “Who Goes Nazi?” The American journalist Dorothy Thompson from 1941, in which she argued that the tendency to fascism depends less on political beliefs than on individual personality traits. The discussion moderated by Galit Eilat combined psychological and neuroscientific perspectives with artistic reflection – and opened how frighteningly timelessly Tempson’s thesis is.

On the screen there was no lack of cinematic representations of anti -authoritarian revolts. In Cristina Perincioli’s short film “For Women – Chapter 1” from 1971, which was still seen on the opening evening, salespeople from the Märkische Quarter in West Berlin organize their first industrial action. They react to patriarchal bosses and low wages with refusal: pressure from below. This means that there is chaos on the goods shelf, the owner mercilessly goes to his knees between detergent boxes and advertising boards. “There is no sun if we don’t see them. There is no truth if we are not looking for them, ”sound tone stones brokener in off; In the meantime, four women stroll through the city without work on open road: “Everything changes when you change it.”

Freedom is also not without political commitment in the films of the filmmaker Dietrich Schubert in Görlitz in Görlitz in Görlitz. His half-hour protest portrait “We have become stronger” from 1968 takes bonds without comment at the essay film and yet remains concrete. “If Bonn drives the emergency!” Is only one of the slogans on the transparent of the students, which organized protest marches against the adoption of the emergency laws. The cameraman is not a neutral observer, but part of the demonstration train. His offensive party for those who occur in the film was a thorn in the side of the German constitutional protection early on. In the 18-minute “A film about the dense fog in the German Winter Forest” from 1981, Schubert explains about any entanglements: During a camera trip, he reads details from the journalist Günter Wallraff, in which his own name is also mentioned.

Schubert refers to the assumptions placed in him, compares it with the facts and thus shows how the image of the “enemy of the constitution” is constructed. In the opening credits for the second part of the Schubert retrospective, which took place in the presence of the filmmaker, Wallraff was again seen-as a political activist who distributed leaflets against the military junta in 1974 in the Greek capital: “Wallraff in Athens” lasts almost one and a half minutes and was still shown on the day of admission in Germany.

The big stories in a short form came mainly from the GDR this year. A state plank commission decided on the possibility of its ceremony; It was prescribed in which direction one had to think-and yet there were fewer restrictive criteria for university films than for the DEFA movie. Felix Mende, curator of this year’s film show “Demoliates to the neighbor- the film of the GDR in Oberhausen”, existed in discussion in this difference- and presented a large number of unconventional GDR short films with ten program blocks, including an independent children’s and youth program. The film system centralized in East Germany saved him a lot of research, on the other hand, in the Oberhausen archive only the award -winning films of past festivals were found.

For the programming, he was considering works that had not been released by the GDR for the short film days-as well as those that the Interministerial Committee for East-West film issues had rejected. “On paper, the criterion of constitutionality was called,” says Mende, who, with the unchanged reunification of “Martin’s Tagebuch” (1955), a directorial work by Heiner Carow Rehabilitated. The short film about a school boy, who was entrusted to a teacher, went through a censual or modeyssey in the run -up to the performance in Oberhausen, the reason: The FRG wanted to deny its neighboring country in the schools of the GDR.

With the film blocks “After Work” and “Incompatible Lives”, Mende has succeeded in tracking down work refusers and other livelihoods apart from the production norm in the middle of the image repertoire dominated by socialist realism; Taboos like suicide, psychiatry and pills have their legitimate place. “But if you want to live like me,” (1988) is about Punk Stummel, who holds his child protectively in his arms and, after years, submits an exit in the youth workshop. In »after work« (1964) Karl Gass accompanied the workers of the oil processing plant in Schwedt after the shift. With “Martha”, Jürgen Böttcher also ventured a decisive step in a different direction in 1979: he puts back the murderer Martha to a human measure in the film of the same name. In the VEB combination of civil engineering in Berlin-Rummelsburg, she initially fishes metal parts from the rubble on the conveyor belt-and decides not to do this at some point. With the words “I feel very well, at home”, the beginning of the end of wage work begins for the 68-year-old. In Oberhausen, the associated relics are already in the museum – at the area of ​​the socio -cultural center Altenberg, which used to be a zinc factory, is a cinema.