Beyond Hollywood.

36TH ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

JANUARY 24-FEBRUARY 4, 2007

Rumors of the death of theatrically based film art have been greatly exaggerated. At least, that is the sense one gets from ten days of continuous film viewing at the 36th Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands. The festival's commitment to supporting avant-garde, third cinema, and other non-commercial film is unique on the international festival circuit as it showcased over 250 feature films and over 400 short films, visual arts exhibitions, performances, panels, and debates from all over the world--except Hollywood. While the festival does have a small market, it is relegated to the last few days of the festival, so that the "buzz" of deal-making does not infect the cinephilic swoon of imaginative image-making for the thousands of filmmakers, critics, and viewers who come to watch, think, and talk.

The festival featured the films of African avant-gardist Abderrahmane Sissako as part of the release of his latest film Bamako (The Court, 2006). Rarely seen in the United States, his films are some of the most important and formally innovative bodies of film work of the last two decades. Each one trades in the poetics of the future as pure possibility. Using the real time of the long take to show the slow rhythms of daily life in developing Africa--Angola in Rostov-Luanda (1997), Mauritania in Waiting for Happiness (2002), Mali in Life on Earth (1998) and Bamako--Sissako's films are not so much stories as they are time pieces in which the present seen in each film is constantly pointing to the virtuality of a not yet defined future. The films are documents of the micro-incidents of daily life in the small villages that hover in the liminal space between traditional life and modernity. Activities such as attempting to make a telephone call to the next town, tuning in a radio station, changing a light bulb, posing for a photograph, or herding goats through the center of the town are documented, but mostly there are the images of people waiting. Each film opens onto the unseen and not yet experienced and the people are ready--but for what, it is not clear to them or us. The feeling is at once hopeful and melancholic. The passing of time is at once filled with potential and entropic: a group of men in Life on Earth sit together listening to the radio over the course of an afternoon, moving their chairs ever closer to the overhang of a building to stay in its shade as the sun cuts across the sky. Hovering over the beauty of this condition of pure immanence is also a deep political anger about the colonial past of underdevelopment and brutalization by the West.

More Brechtian in its form, and more incendiary in intention than his other films, Bamako is structured around a citizens' tribunal held in a small Malian town to indict the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for the continuing underdevelopment and poverty in Mali--in Africa. Sissako used real African and European judges and lawyers, as well as a range of men and women (young and old) from the village, whose improvised arguments make a passionate case against the neo-liberal economic policies that are savaging Africa. As the trial goes on, it is broadcast throughout the village on radio as the activities of daily life continue. The camera cuts away to the mundane daily activities of people throughout the village. As in Epic theatre, the film is filled with interruptions and digressions that disrupt the verisimilitude of the stories that form within and around the trial. Life is never a completed story nor is politics; rather, they are a series of ephemeral possibilities that are given voice, struggled with, and often forgotten. In the end, the film is a cry of anger and grief that must be listened to; each word and image a lesson for Africa and the West about the destructiveness of the current deep economic disparities that exist globally and are perpetuated by unrestrained free-market capitalism. While Sissako posits a future, it is one that has no direction and can only be created through careful listening, seeing, and thinking.

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In contrast, the European and North American avant-garde filmmakers' engagement with the social and political as aesthetic practice is harder to pin down. This year, the festival focused on the history of expanded forms of cinema from the 1960s and 1970s, integrating performance and sculpture with film and the problems of preserving such ephemeral works in their original 16 mm format. The opportunity to see a range of classic single and multiple screen works such as Valie Export's Auf+Ab+An+Zu (1968), Malcolm LeGrice's Horror Film 1 (1971), and Anthony McCall's classic light sculpture Line Describing a Cone (1971), as well as Tony Conrad's extended duration piece Yellow Movie 2/26/73 (1973) and Pickled Eastman Kodak 7302 (2006), shown in a nearby gallery of para-cinema pieces, was extraordinary. In seeing these works again, one is struck by their engagement with a politics of counter-cinema. Messy, noisy, and unruly, the abstraction of the work is materialist, not only in the ways it engages filmic material as its subject, but in the sense of its attempt to liberate cinema from the confines of the industrial production and exhibition of the time. The spirit was activist and interventionist, creating new discourses and debates.

It was interesting to see the current exponents of this expanded tradition: artists such as Sandra Gibson, Bruce McClure, Simon Payne, Luis Recoder, and Jennifer Reeves who presented hours of largely abstract projector/film loop/room performances. Gibson and Recoder's six-hour Atmos (2006) uses a 16 mm projector to cast white light on a screen. A water-filled humidifier is set in front, making subtle changes in the light's density on the screen. All seem to refigure the materiality of the medium away from the social and a politics of representation toward an abstraction meant to induce some sort of trance or hypnotic experience of the sublime. It is difficult to fathom the attraction of this kind of low-affect experience given what is going on in the world today. Is this kind of abstraction--a sort of visual trance music--a way of avoiding the realities of the world and the problems of its representation? Or is it an act of resistance in the form of hypnotic stupor? A notable exception was Keith Sanborn's installation Clear to Engage (2006), a chilling deconstruction of footage of the killing of two soldiers via satellite command in the current Iraq war. Sanborn takes the viewer deeply into the image of distanced high-tech killing via video interface. Deeply materialist, the piece allows for the examination of the space created via digital imaging and its role in remote-control warfare.

The question of medium specificity was also a theme at the festival with a category titled "Still 16." Dozens of short 16 mm films were screened seemingly to honor the last gasp of a dying medium. Paige Sarlin premiered her 16 mm film The Last Slide Show (2005), an ambitious essay that meditates on the end of analogue imaging technology through the demise of the 35 mm slide projector. Her film tries to work through the philosophical and cultural implications of the ending of one form of technology and the emergence of another. James Benning is perhaps the most renowned filmmaker who militantly continues to work and exhibit exclusively in 16 mm, a master of the simple formalizing gesture that produces complex results, Benning presented a remake of his classic 1977 film One Way Boogie Woogie, an exploration of the decaying industrial valley in Milwaukee. The original film is made up of sixty 60-second static shots, each a small image sound event. In 2004, Benning reshot the film, returning to the same sixty sites of the earlier film, often using the same people who were in the original shots. Each film is shown one after the other, and the differences are stunning not only in the ways the locations have changed and the people have aged, but also in the quality of the images themselves. In the remake, Benning was forced to use modern 16 mm negative film instead of the now extinct Ektachrome reversal film used for the first film; the differences are striking. The complete work is an elegiac piece about the ever-changing cityscape, memory, and aging. Never nostalgic, the film mourns the entropic nature of time. The landscape of the de-industrialized city has transformed--but into something clean and more sterile as has the new hi-tech image itself.

But perhaps the most moving work about relationships between history and technology was Ken Jacobs's latest work, Capitalism: Child Labor (2007). A 14-minute heart stopper, Jacobs uses a found stereoscopic photograph of a late nineteenth-century urban textile factory. In the film, barefoot children at the looms are watched over by adult foremen. Transforming this archaic stereo photograph into a digital image, Jacobs broods over this disturbing image, exploring the details of the factory and the figures to expose its deep politics. The video explodes into a dynamic examination of spaces by cutting between the bodies of the men, children, and machinery to create an overwhelming sense of the vulnerability of children's bodies and the power of adults over them. The physicality of the images strikes your eyes, bringing this image of past child exploitation into the present and connecting it to continuing exploitation of children in the production of consumer goods all over the globe.

Working with the latest digital technologies, Jacqueline Goss premiered her latest film, Stranger Comes to Town (2007), a witty and unusual documentary about immigration identity and technology post-9/11. Goss gathered testimonies of the trials and tribulations of six people legally crossing into the U.S. She had each design an avatar from the online video game World of Warcraft to produce a cyber image of their own feelings of otherness through whom their own stories were spoken. Ripping and reworking the now familiar instructional animation from the Department of Homeland Security at airports, this mix of personal testimony, cyber-imaging, and government propaganda is an imaginative way of speaking about the ways fear circulates, making us into strangers--even to ourselves.

The range of single screen films made by North Americans was extraordinary, especially given the lack of funding and institutional support for non-commercial art and media in the U.S. New works by a mix of younger emerging filmmakers included James T. Hong's The Denazification of MH (2007), Michael Robinson's And We All Shine On (2006), Ben Russell's Black and White Trypps #3 (2007), and Gretchen Skogerson's Drive-Thru (2006). Other new works that were particularly notable were Liza Johnson's South of Ten (2006), a short, visually sumptuous and respectfully observed document of the post-Katrina cleanup, and Kevin Jerome Everson's According to ... (2007), a short poem about "accidental" death that surrounds African American communities in America.

In 2007, post-cinema theorists are laying odds on the liberating potential of the high-tech world of Internet culture and computer gaming, and gallerists and museum curators are figuring better ways of marketing filmic objects for white box consumption. International avant-garde cinema, however, continues to explore radical cinematic form and content in the social setting of the film theatre, insisting upon cinema's historical aspiration of an art form that can help transform the world. This makes a festival like Rotterdam, which continues to engage and nurture this work, more important than ever.

JEFFREY SKOLLER is a filmmaker who frequently writes about experimental film. His book Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. He currently teaches in the Film Studies Program at University of California, Berkeley.