Poliglocia

As every year, the Oberhausen Film Festival delivers more than anyone could possibly chew or swallow. The Latin American theme screening delivered excellent insight beyond the clichés the region often loses the perspective of itself. I also missed out on the retrospective on grand Chinese animator Sun Xun. Still, I will for now focus on the animation films in the international competition. One of the big winners of the year was Hayoun Kwon's "489 years". The film uses 3d animation to reconstruct the real testimony of a soldier on the border between South and North Korea. Of course, this reminds both of popular 1st person shooting games and of the "serious games" used for reconstruction of traumatic military situations, widely known through the work of Haroun Farocki. The director is conscious of these connections and sees it as placing her work between reality and fiction. The visions can, after all, only be true to memory and not to fact, and are mostly the i...

Last weekend, the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen took place for the 61st time. In this case it had clearly a central figure: Ito Takashi was featured not only as a special guest presenting a long retrospective of his masterpieces; he was also included in the special program about 3d film and space, and even participated in the competition with his new film "Saigo no Tenshi". He also won two major prizes. This first post, therefore, will be mainly about his work. I hope to get to write about the many other amazing experiences of the festivals in a later entry. A frame is a frame is a frame: The works of Takashi Ito 1977-1985 It is hard to believe that a movie can be so shocking without anything happening in it: Flashes, intersected pictures, a wildly, frantically moving camera - is the camera moving, or is movement but a composition of static, separate images? All of Ito's works are clearly modern art in the sense of Ortega y Gasset's dehumanization: they don...