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Four Short Films 8 March 04

Section: article

Categories: Film / in-a-cinema

We went to see four short films that were recent recipients of some German short-film prizes: three of the films were nonsense and one was bad. We quietly left after the beginning of the fourth film. The first and third were cute and facile computer animated films and obviously appealed to the awards jury.

The second film, the bad one, warrants some comments. It is called Visit Iraq and as a more clearly conceptual piece it might have had some interest. It revolved around the deserted offices of Iraqi Airways in Geneva, Switzerland: long views, initially unidentified, of and into the office windows. The shots become interspersed with “person-on-the-street” interviews with passersby: most of the interviews were with local shopowners uttering banalities about the deserted office. Posed against that was an “interview” with a man who appeared to be mentally ill, speaking extremely fast in French, English and some German about intelligence organizations persecuting him… the thing is that everything he said was perfectly plausible (his phone being tapped, etc.) but his demeaner made him seem deluded.
My description, for me, makes the film seem far more interesting than it was. The film does reflect something about life during war-time: good shopkeepers babbling shallow banalities and seeming reasonable, while a critical man who rants on with some plausible views seems crazy, outside the parameters of reasonable discourse to paraphrase Chomsky.

The film moves towards its end with one of the shopkeepers doing a series of imitations of various farm animals… looked at charitably it could be thought that the filmmaker was making some comment on the two poles of interviewees and what we consider normal and crazy. But that is too charitable; he was just trying to be cute and amusing while making fun of the person. Obviously it helped get him a prize.

Title:  Q 

By: Oliver Husein

TItle: Visit Iraq

By: Kamal Aljafari

Title: Yo Lo Vi

By: Hann Nordholt and Fritz Steingrobe

Title: Himmelreich

By: Jan Bosse

Years: 2003 for the first three and 2002 for the fourth

Cinema: Filmmuseum, Frankfurt

  • Title: Four Short Films