REVIEWS KINOMUSEUM
KINOMUSEUM
53RD INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL OBERHAUSEN
3 – 8 MAY
The Oberhausen Short Film Festival – held in a small industrial town artists Mary Kelly, AA Bronson and Mark Leckey. Leckey astutely
south of Düsseldorf – claims political glory days, as the site of the adapted his practice’s investigation into the ascendancy of image
radical 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto and a point of entry to the West over referent by looking at fi lm’s illusion of physicality – in work from
for dissident Eastern Bloc fi lmmakers. This political background Philip Guston’s late paintings to cartoons of Garfi eld and Felix the
is useful for elucidating the concerns of Ian White’s extraordinary Cat, and Hollis Frampton’s Lemon (1969). Leckey’s performance
fi lm programme, which ran alongside this year’s (uneven) juried fi lm found its power and pathos from its continual rubbing up against
competition. Kinomuseum addressed the adequacy and failures the limitations of immanent critique, framed here as personal
of the museum as a site of cultural exchange and communication. ruminations. Titled Cinema-in-the-Round, it linked with key issues
White’s aim was to formulate the museum anew, replacing of materiality and corporeality that recurred throughout White’s
architecture, and the founding nineteenth-century ideals of programme, most notably in Emma Hart’s Skin Film 3 ( 2 0 0 6 ) , a fi l m
education and paternal authority, with the temporary and collective made of fl akes of the artist’s skin, Sellotaped to 16mm fi lm stock.
engagement of a cinema audience. The programme presented both The theme of death, traditionally linked to the museum but
historical and contemporary fi lm and video – from Georges Franju apparently staved of_f by fi lm, was a constant, as in Alain Resnais’s
and David Lamelas to Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa and Seth magisterial Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), of Paris’s Bibliothèque
Price – that represented the museum as subject or which take the Nationale, or Megan Fraser’s documentation of the closing of a
museum’s roles – of preserving information or endowing authority medical museum (Untitled, 2007). Morgan Fisher introduced his
– upon itself. White also presented a number of fi lms as artefacts: Oberhausen ‘state’ of Screening Room ( 1 9 6 8 / 2 0 0 7 ) – a s i t e - s p e c i fi c
a 1927 fi lm by New York’s Natural History Museum addressed the tracking shot created solely for the cinema in which it is shown – with
dissemination of fi lms from its collection to the city’s schools. Film a lecture relating mortality to point of view: a character in a fi lm will
in the museum collection, such works remind us, is an arm of the long outlast the real actor playing that role. The whif_f of mortality
museum itself, carrying out the museum’s project of ‘civilising’ the hung in the air at its screening; the audience was unlikely to see this
public. White’s programme tendered a productive ambivalence state ever again. The ephemeral nature of White’s programme, the
towards such fi lms: a sheer delight in their formal structures, and a high level of subtlety and intelligence sustained across all fi ve days
reaction against the notions they embody. and encompassing the viewpoints of the guest curators as well as
White’s fi ve screenings were supplemented by fi ve by guest spontaneous audience discussion, made it likewise an event that will
curators: curators Achim Borchardt-Hume and Emily Pethick, and last in memory, but will not recur for some time. Melissa Gronlund
Still from 1., 2., 3. (Bela B. feat. Charlotte Roche), 2006, dir Norbert Heitker. Courtesy Q Filmproduktion & Short Film Festival Oberhausen
ARTREVIEW one.linthree.linfour.lin
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