![]() ![]() ![]() Second of all, the decision was made to broadcast the traditional competition “live”, at precise hours, the audience having the option of watching the films either on a stream, either on an individual basis, but with little over an hour to catch up with them. ![]() However, two main differences were at stake this year: first of all, this edition was the first one in the festival’s history to also host an online competition, a curatorial decision which seems to have most probably been prompted by the coronacrisis, thus practically doubling the events’ tally of recent films. Oberhausen’s 2021 edition took part mostly in the same way as it did one year ago, strictly in terms of its viewing system, wherein each of its programs was available to watch for 48 hours, its competitions being complemented by various retrospectives or mini-catalogs put together by a select number of distribution companies and archives. What does this have to say about the immediacy, authenticity, and sense of participation described by Vogel, or of their absence? Is the absolute distance of theater coming back, under a transmogrified appearance? And can we still choose Brecht’s distancing effect over the fluid subversiveness of Vogel after such a year? Still from Relativity, by Ed Emshwiller. I’m choosing this extract on a rhetorical note, wondering about the role and place of the camera in a time in which those who guide it were forced to limit their own movements a period in which the camera has often turned towards its handler(s) and their own circumstances of borrowed images from other cameras. Nor the fact that one of the films in this micro-selection (which also featured Agnes Varda’s Black Panthers and Gunvor Nelson’s Kirsa Nicholina ) was Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity, whom Vogel called the most accomplished craftsman of the American Avant-garde, whose wild, hypnotic oscillations and movements are a perfect illustration of the above thesis. I’m starting this text with a quote from Amos Vogel (a quote which, to purists of the continuous steady shot, might almost come across as a form of heresy) not just because the most recent edition of Oberhausen hosed a tiny 4-film retrospective program with titles selected by the legendary curator throughout his tenure at the festival in the sixties. – Amos Vogel, “The Triumph and Death of the Moving Camera”, in Film as a Subversive Art, 1974. Fluidity of camera, its elaborate, choreographic movement within the frame have since become symbols of creative cinema, offering immediacy, authenticity, and a sense of physical participation which the immobile camera could not match. (…) It moving camera (….) that served as harbinger of a revolution which – with the development of montage – transformed cinema into an art form. ![]() A further step consisted in the development of mechanical devices (special vehicles, cranes, rails, flexible tripods for pans or tilts) to change camera position. This, for the first time, violated what had previously been considered an absolute distance and set the stage for an intricate (…) orchestration of establishing-, medium-, and close-shot. The liberation of the camera proceeded in stages first, (though remaining fixed) the camera changed position between shots, bringing the action closer to or removing it from the viewer. Movement was confined to the actors and their constant regrouping in theatrical space. Until then, the cinema’s full potential could not be realized an immobile camera, in the fashion of a theatergoer, stared at a proscenium beyond which the action of the photo-”play” took place. The transformation of film from surrogate theatre to visual art occurred when the camera began to move. ![]()
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