The 26th Schmalfilmtage Dresden are not quite over yet, but due to my schedule I had to leave a little earlier and therefore missed the Sunday program. Allow me to sum up anyway.
It was my first time at the Dresdener Schmalfilmtage, as they chronically happen during the Hamburg school vacations and family just comes first. This yera, it finally worked out, and all in all I am extremely positively surprised and filled with many wonderful impressions. Despite all the positive impressions, there are unfortunately also points that unnecessarily overshadow the overall impression negatively, but more on that later.
The Schmalfilmtage fill you up with a high dose of compressed indie-content. After the opening on Thursday evening, there were 14 hours of program each day, which often consisted of rather hard-to-digest content. Just under 10% of the small-format films submitted made it into the selection of the festival program, and this quintessence is often bulky and has it all. Of course, it is the inherent task of an international festival to provide a stage for a wide range of artistic creation, and this was clearly achieved. In addition to the numerous film programmes in the large “Motorenhalle”, there are also workshops, performances, talks, exhibitions, film-related music and, of course, competitions in the charming backyard of the organizer Riesa Efau – but above all: like-minded people.
There is probably no other place where you can meet so many like-minded people who are as chronically infected by the celluloid virus as we all are, and in addition to the exchange with old friends and familiar faces, every visitor was probably able to make a lot of new, international and valuable contacts – that is probably incomparable in this density. It warms the heart, and the timing and length of the festival provide sufficient space for in-depth discussions. For this alone, we can only thank the organizers. It is particularly commendable that the organizers succeeded in attracting a rather large young audience, at least at times.
This was particularly noticeable on the superbly programmed Friday evening, when many visitors were unable to get a seat in the large hall. It’s good to see how a young audience was able to smell blood here – and this applies even more to the two-day “BUNT AUF ACHT” workshop led by chemist and filmer Malte Bartels, in which a really warm, unifying and inspiring group feeling was created while learning the rather complicated Chromaflex process.
However, the range of films shown in the rest of the program was sometimes difficult to digest, and in some cases even borderline excruciating. I’m certainly no art expert, but the audience reactions showed quite unanimously that the quality of the curation of individual events varied greatly. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the right mood on Thursday yet, but it wasn’t just me expecting (or hoping?) that a disguised comedian would relieve me of the artificial seriousness of what was on offer. Just this much: in my opinion, scratch films don’t get any better if you wave ashtrays, seaweed or colored foil in front of the projector lens. One can put up with it for fifteen minutes though.
It became more difficult when snippets of Romanian family films were presented as a diptych, only held together by the fact that shaky, boring landscapes loop on the left and random faces on the right. In mute, in absolute silence, in the huge hall. For a full 20 minutes. I could no longer take the whole thing completely serious when almost exactly the same film snippets were shown a second time, but in a slightly different order — and I kept my eyes peeled for hidden camera when the artist in attendance (apologizing, after all) fed us the same soup in a third, completely redundant recombination. Afterwards, we were shown too many photos of this exact presentation in other places, and an interview in which the festival’s director and host addressed the likeably modest creator Razvan Anton as “Ravzan” (which sounds like “razor tooth” in German) throughout. As a host and interviewer, you should know the name of your guest.
The subsequent “international Found Footage” competition was also very dark and heavy in terms of content. Only two of the twelve qualifying entries were more gripping than disturbing: only thanks to the audience award winner “Idealismo Legleriano” by Niccolò Beretti and Pere Ginard’s “Sightings” (jury winner), I was able to end the evening not completely disillusioned.
Saturday afternoon’s film program also got off to a challenging start. Margaret Raspé was certainly a film pioneer with an interesting CV, and her self-made, Agfa Microflex-based “helmet camera” was way ahead of its time in 1974. Her everyday activities captured in first-person shooter style certainly have great potential as an installation, but watching her for over an hour (dissect a chicken, scribble on a sheet of paper at random, and then spend 20 minutes washing up dishes) simply doesn’t work as a silent film presentation in cinema format. I didn’t meet a single visitor who didn’t come out of the hall disappointed and annoyed at this form of presentation.
But let’s finally get to the positives, and there were plenty of them: everything that followed on Friday was an absolute delight, excellently put together and highly entertaining. And this was not only due to the contrast with the previous mourning program. Jan Nordsieck entertainingly and skillfully moderated a round of talks with top Super 8 star, covering the 60th birthday of the film format we love so much. In addition to delicious birthday cakes, there were witty insights into the lab operations by Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie from Melbourne, industry insights from Jürgen Lossau, film collector knowledge from off2 maker Joachim Schmidt, and creative representation from organic soup queen Dagie Brundert and film producer Michael Sommermeyer. The audience was engaged and time flew by. It was clear to see what good moderation is all about: Jan Nordsieck was well prepared and created a visible stage for those present and for the audience, with just a few good questions.
No less brilliantly, a little later he took the large audience in the Motorenhalle by the hand for the Super 8 birthday program “Von der Rolle zur Kassette” (“from roll to cartridge”), a revue-like compilation of highly entertaining films that actually covered the entire spectrum that Super 8 describes.
A quirky Bolex advertising film, an award-winning poetry adaptation by Patrick Müller, Dagie’s workshop highlights from past festivals, a real amateur film (Anonyme Analogiker Berlin, 2015), a complete short version of the vampire C-movie “Love at First Bite”, an experimental film shot in a microfiber sock (my personal festival highlight) — nothing was missing here.
But my absolute highlight of the festival was probably the subsequently following “live soundtrack” competition. Less confident than Jan Nordsieck, but charming, the singer Enna Miau navigated through the dubbing efforts of the nine film contributions by nine different musicians and groups. Eight DEFA educational films were shown, followed by the amateur feature film fragment “Green Planet” by Sessil Siffkov and Klaus Schreier, which was resurrected after 43 years of being lost. The musical inventions were almost all great, the choice of a winner very difficult. Kudos to René Seim, who casted and recruited the participating artists! In the end, the deserving winners were “Die Kramps” (Bremen) as the jury winner with the soundtrack to a puppet film, and “Flinta Flöten” as the audience favorite for “Emotionen”, an educational film by the German Hygiene Museum. Great fun! I was in bed by 2 o’clock in the morning.
After breakfast, Saturday’s program began with the very unwieldy French-Belgian portrait “Ôte-toi de mon soleil” about a wise, compulsive hoarder, which in no way managed to reach me. It may also be due to my rusty French, but the impression of a disappointing, inappropriately empty visual language and disproportionate lengths was also shared by francophone film connoisseurs in my vicinity. Never mind, there were plenty of people to chat to outside the hall.
This was followed by another highlight: the live scoring of the amateur silent film “Lilly Strada”. This almost 70-minute Lysistrata parable, a “gangster spectacle about gangs, brides and bed boycotts”, was retained at the time after being developed by the Stasi-controlled reversal lab, and simply shot a second time in 1992. A very compelling piece of work — amateur feature film is, after all, a difficult subject, here it is brilliantly and entertainingly successful. The musical accompaniment and the authentic moderation by one of the makers also provided the perfect setting. Unfortunately, it remains unclear why the man was not given a microphone in the Q&A after the film.
This was followed by what has always been the highlight of the festival: the international competition. Unfortunately, this fell significantly short of the previous day’s program in many respects: I counted around 70 spectators, whereas there were certainly twice as many at the live dubbing the day before. A conspicuous number of people also left the hall during the event, which was certainly not only due to the very gloomy, often simply depressing selection of contributions, but also to such banal things as failing technology. On Saturday evenings, people interested in art also want to be entertained, but the competition was unfortunately a multidimensional suffering that left not only me annoyed and disappointed.
Dear Riesa Efau, something really needs to happen here. Yes, sometimes a cable breaks – but when the entire right channel not only constantly fails from Thursday to Sunday but also hums and splutters like that, it not only ruins every soundtrack, but also your ears. My smartwatch warned me several times about volume levels above 95 dB, and these are no fun if they are caused by faulty technology. Something also needs to be done about the microphones, I assume yours are good for beatbox artists — at the very least, they were unpleasantly tantalizing with plosive sounds that are simply no longer up to date, even without broken amplification. But even worse than the simply broken sound are the voice talents of your presenters.
What I experienced here (apart from Jan Nordsieck and Enna Miau, where he latter is more an M.C. than a presenter) was simply unacceptable throughout, and reminded me of fifth-graders giving their first presentation in a shy and cringing manner. When your technology is up and running again, please organize some stage speech training, learn where and how to hold a microphone — or find people who can already do it better. The incomprehensible mumbling, usually bad, bumpy and misread, torments the movie and the audience. It seems disrespectful and anything but valueing towards the films and artists, often not even their names were mentioned. As a viewer, you squirm in your chair in shame and hope that it will soon be over.
However, the best speaker and the best technology are of no use if you only read the text from the program that every audience member is holding in their hands anyway. Presentation is active communication, it provides the framework for what is to be expected. Better no framework at all, than such a disrespectfully bad one.
Of the 13 entries, however, I really enjoyed three of them, even if the embarrassments generally overshadowed the whole thing. “The Plot” by trophy subscribers Michael Sommermeyer and Manuel Francescon, “The Jacobs Way” by Xenia Nitschke and “Slides” by british fellow Ben Slotover were true Super 8: Fast, homemade, funny, authentic, entertaining, and full of attention to detail. The majority of the other films, on the other hand, were far too long, and I often perceived more of an effects frenzy than actual quality.
Considering that Kodak sells 90% of its films in color, one is surprised at the enormous amount of material shown in dull, bludgeoning black and white, accompanied by a booming soup of rumbling, noise and humming in the sub-100 Hz range. Almost every one of these films would have been much better at half the length. One can only hope that the curators learn from this and, in addition to mastering the technology and presentation challenges, put together a program next year that doesn’t plunge you into a new depression every five minutes — otherwise the number of viewers could quickly halve once more.
Conclusion: I would love to come back in 2026! In the end, the positive aspects clearly outweighed the negative ones, and the shortcomings can really only improve. Many thanks for the wonderful days and the many valuable encounters!
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