"Oberhausen" Colin Perry

Taking viewers back to the vaudevillian dawn of cinema, the 56th edition of the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival was reflective and historiographical in intent, but light-hearted and genial in spirit. The main themed programme was titled ‘From The Deep: The Great Experiment 1898–1918’, an impressive collection of around a hundred short films from the dawn of cinema; there was also an interesting programme of No Wave films from the late 1970s and early ’80s co-organized with the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna. For all their obvious differences, the works in both programmes belonged to now-vanished audiences – as one commentator in the catalogue noted, these films ‘were not meant for our eyes’. Other presentations were, of course, very much designed for our viewing: there was the usual competition programme, children’s cinema, music videos, performances and brow-wrinklingly obtuse forums.