Oberhausen Short Film Festival | The political commitment

This was a recurring theme: The question of the psychological and societal prerequisites for conformity and opportunism was at the heart of the official opening on Wednesday morning. Under the title "Who Will Become a Fascist?", social and cognitive scientist Emilie A. Caspar (Ghent), psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala (London), and artists Artur Żmijewski (Warsaw) and Rod Dickinson (Bristol) took part in the panel discussion. The starting point was the 1941 essay "Who Goes Nazi?" by the US journalist Dorothy Thompson , in which she argued that the inclination towards fascism depends less on political convictions than on individual personality traits. The discussion, moderated by Galit Eilat, combined psychological and neuroscientific perspectives with artistic reflection – and revealed how shockingly timeless Thompson's thesis is.

There was no shortage of cinematic depictions of anti-authoritarian revolts on screen. In Cristina Perincioli's 1971 short film "For Women – Chapter 1," which was shown on the opening night, shop assistants from the Märkisches Viertel district of West Berlin organize their first labor dispute. They react to patriarchal bosses and low wages with refusal: pressure from below. This leads to chaos on the shelves, and the owner mercilessly falls to his knees between detergent cartons and billboards. "There is no sun if we don't see it. There is no truth if we don't seek it," sings Ton Steine ​​Scherben in the background; meanwhile, four unemployed women stroll through the city streets: "Everything changes when you change it."

Freedom is not without political commitment, even in the films of filmmaker Dietrich Schubert, born in Görlitz in 1940. His roughly half-hour protest portrait "We Have Become Stronger" from 1968 borrows silently from essay films, yet remains concrete. "Drive out the state of emergency in Bonn!" is just one of the slogans on the banners of the students who organized the protest marches against the passage of the emergency laws. The cameraman is not a neutral observer, but part of the demonstration. His aggressive siding with those featured in the film was an early thorn in the side of the West German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. In the 18-minute "A Film About the Thickening Fog in the German Winter Forest" from 1981, Schubert sheds light on any possible entanglements: During a tracking shot, he reads out details from the file of the journalist Günter Wallraff, in which his own name is also mentioned.

Schubert refers to the allegations leveled at him, compares them with the facts, and thus demonstrates how the image of the "enemy of the constitution" is constructed. In the opening credits to the second part of the Schubert retrospective, which took place in the presence of the filmmaker, Wallraff was seen once again – as a political activist distributing leaflets against the military junta in a square in the Greek capital in 1974: "Wallraff in Athens" lasts just under one and a half minutes and was shown in Germany on the same day it was filmed.

This year, the major stories in condensed form came primarily from the GDR. At that time, a State Planning Commission decided on the feasibility of their production; the direction one had to take was prescribed – and yet, less restrictive criteria applied to university films than to DEFA cinema films. Felix Mende, curator of this year's film festival "Detours to the Neighbor - The Film of the GDR in Oberhausen," emphasized this difference in conversation – and presented a variety of unconventional GDR short films in ten program blocks, including a separate children's and youth program. The centralized film industry in East Germany saved him a lot of research effort, he said, while the Oberhausen archive only contained the award-winning films from past festivals.

For the programming, he considered works that had not been approved for the Short Film Festival by the GDR – as well as those that the Interministerial Committee for East-West Film Issues of the Federal Republic of Germany had rejected. "On paper, the criterion was unconstitutionality," says Mende, who, with the unaltered re-screening of "Martin's Diary" (1955), is rehabilitating a directorial work by Heiner Carow. The short film about a schoolboy, drilled by his parents, who confides in a teacher, underwent a censorship odyssey lasting several months prior to its screening in Oberhausen. The reason: the Federal Republic of Germany wanted to deny its neighboring country the existence of educational work being carried out in GDR schools.

With the film blocks "After Work" and "Incompatible Lives," Mende succeeded in tracking down work refusers and other existences outside the production norm amidst the visual repertoire dominated by socialist realism; taboos such as suicide, psychiatry, and pills have their legitimate place in it. "But if you want to live like me" (1988) is about punk Stummel, who holds his child protectively in his arms and, after years in a youth correctional facility, applies for an exit visa. In "Feierabend" (1964), Karl Gass accompanies the workers of the petroleum processing plant in Schwedt after their shift. With "Martha," Jürgen Böttcher also dared a decisive step in a different direction in 1979: in the film of the same name, he reduced Martha, the woman clearing rubble, to a more human scale. At the VEB Kombinat Tiefbau (Stately Owned Civil Engineering Company) in Berlin-Rummelsburg, she initially fished metal parts out of the construction rubble on the conveyor belt – but eventually decided to stop doing that. With the words "I feel right at home," the 68-year-old's wage labor began and the end of it. In Oberhausen, the associated relics are already on display in a museum – there's a cinema on the grounds of the Altenberg socio-cultural center, which was formerly a zinc factory.