Rediscovering Dore O.’s cinema of the self
THE IMAGES MOST ASSOCIATED with the German filmmaker and artist Dore O. are of a girl, face-up like Millais’s Ophelia, drifting phantasmally over ocean waters, her physique a gauzy projection superimposed onto a blue backdrop of stressed motion. The girl is twentysomething Dore herself in her second movie, Alaska (1968), a supple succession of beachy nonetheless pictures and double exposures whose femininity and softness really feel misleading. Staccato modifying rhythms and a menacing drone agitate these ethereal visions. And is the lady fading, or coming into view? The pictures now carry an terrible prescience in mild of Dore’s latest dying at age seventy-five. This March, the filmmaker’s physique was discovered within the Ruhr river; reportedly she had been affected by gentle dementia. Dore O., who was not instantly recognized, had been lacking for weeks.
Till just a few years in the past, Dore’s movies from the Sixties and ’70s had virtually been misplaced; the remaining prints had badly deteriorated and develop into unwatchable. The archivist and researcher Masha Matzke, who spearheaded the movies’ digital restoration with the collaboration of Dore and the Deutsche Kinemathek, is basically accountable for reversing their fates and launching an more and more enthusiastic reappraisal of Dore’s output. Higher late than by no means: Dore was one of many solely German ladies persistently making experimental movies earlier than the ’80s, and at each flip, it appears, her work bucks simple categorization, at the same time as its primal poetics evoke the movies of celebrated avant-gardists like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage. “A Tribute to Dore O.,” a three-day series hosted by Anthology Movie Archives, will present New York audiences a chance to see for themselves the sensual and haunting power of this uncared for determine from Germany’s “different” cinema.
Born Dore Oberloskammp in 1946, Dore O. was a painter earlier than turning to movie within the late ’60s, a not unusual shift for younger West German artists on the time, swept up as a lot of them have been by the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist beliefs of the New Left. The medium’s powers of documentation have been thought-about key within the battle towards the prevailing social order, inspiring a rethinking of the technique of creative manufacturing and distribution that resulted within the proliferation of movie collectives throughout the nation.
Dore O. was a cofounder of 1 such group, the Hamburg Filmmakers’ Cooperative, which shaped in 1968 after the avant-garde historian P. Adams Sitney visited town and offered screenings by Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Gregory Markopoulos, and Jonas Mekas, amongst others. The collective turned one in all Europe’s most necessary unbiased distributors, distinguished by its auteurist leanings and its shut ties to the worldwide experimental movie neighborhood. Maybe this connection can account, at the least partly, for the commonalities between Dore’s work and that of the American avant-garde—in addition to Dore’s outlier standing inside her dwelling nation’s experimental movie scene. The place a lot of her West German contemporaries pivoted to grassroots media activism or leftist movie idea, Dore continued to construct upon a legacy of nonnarrative surrealist cinema rooted within the poetical textures of the unconscious. From the get-go, her work articulated subterranean moods and emotions anchored to her personal recollections and experiences, creating an alternate realm of notion shot by means of with nostalgia, vulnerability, misery, and longing.
Take Lawale (1969), a sort of home drama that unfolds throughout a collection of static pictures. Within the movie, we see the members of a bourgeois household positioned in several preparations round a home, snapshots of a routine existence instilled with dread and rigidity—the rating, industrial clanging accompanied by what sounds just like the world’s worst violin participant, ensures this. These eerie portraits see the frozen relations at tea, on the stairway, gazing out the window, their backs sometimes to the digital camera, suggesting a sure emotional inaccessibility. Photographs of a distant hill, menacingly primordial towards a cloudy sky, bookend the movie, with close-ups of a struggling physique, or our bodies, faintly superimposed over the monolithic panorama; after which, the jarringly tactile picture of Dore herself, kneeling over a mattress of sheepskins, tossing her hair forwards and backwards as if within the grip of a feverish possession.
Dore typically collaborated along with her husband, the artist Werner Nekes; the 2 codirected Dore’s first movie, the 1968 brief Jüm-Jüm—a percussive concatenation of stationary pictures that present a girl swinging in entrance of a giant portray of a phallus—they usually shared an affinity for classic optical gadgets (Nekes was a collector). Their work each relied on an creative manipulation of celluloid movie, although Dore specifically used methods like double publicity, rear projections, and superimposition to get at a brand new sort of language, a manner of seeing whose logic was associated extra to the intuitively expressive powers of music than any rational precept. Dore’s fascination with the parameters of notion—how movie can disrupt and develop them—is probably most clearly obvious in Kaskara (1974), composed nearly solely of the passageways (doorways, home windows, mirrors) that recur all through Dore’s oeuvre, and that are right here multiplied and dense with reflective layers. Shot within the couple’s summer time cottage in Sweden, the movie finds a person, Nekes, floating in and round the home, with superimpositions dissolving the boundaries between the panorama and the rooms, collapsing exterior and inside into one unified actuality.
Whereas Dore was not interested by explicitly participating with politics, her work was not airtight. As an alternative, it obliquely folds Germany’s historical past—its lengthy shadow of fascism, its colonial violence, its brutally bolstered iron curtain—into wealthy and generative layers of subjectivity. Alaska accommodates flashes of unidentified Indigenous folks and opens with photographs of a jail, a nod to the mounting unease again in West Berlin, the place the then-recent killing of scholar protestor Benno Ohnesorg by a policeman catalyzed a motion towards the state’s authoritarian impulses; Blonde Barbarei (1972) alludes to the aesthetics of the Third Reich, with a triumphant choral association given Riefenstahlian undertones because of the distant define of an infinite building challenge; shadowy glimpses of a cabaret efficiency produce a way of decadence and foreboding. After which there may be Kaladon (1971), a kind of travelogue of Dore and Nekes’s journey to Iceland, its rocky panorama captured in woozy, paranormal greens. For an older era of German viewers, these vistas may conjure the nation’s postwar ruins, the backdrop for late-’40s Trümmerfilme, or “rubble movies.”
But the movies of Dore O. can’t be pinned all the way down to a single preoccupation—that’s their nice advantage, and one of many the explanation why they very practically vanished. They’re thick with Dore’s life, whose sides are disassembled and reconstituted by new, extra slippery designs. She beckons us to commune along with her on a intestine stage, permitting herself to stay elusive at the same time as she lays naked her deepest intimacies.
— Beatrice Loayza
“A Tribute to Dore O.” runs at Anthology Movie Archives in New York from June 17 to June 19.
