More than Meets the Eye - Christoph Oeschger

Christoph Oeschger

More Than Meets the Eye: Capturing Invisible Flows and Processes: For my doctorate, I created four films and one photo-text installation that engage with invisibility in various ways. My research for the film "2°", which seeks the impact of human interaction with changing geographies, took me to an altitude of 3,500 meters above sea level. In my investigations, I traveled as far north as the 51st parallel to produce the film "In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace", and the photo series "The Other Side of Ice", examining the economic exploitation of the Arctic. My research also led me to a place where the wind is harnessed for filming, inspiring the creation of the film "Memories of a Past Future", and to a location where filming is no longer possible, yielding images used in the production of "Unlearning Flow". The decisive events of our time are often not visible. My research revolves around making this invisibility negotiable. These occurrences possess a fascinating duality, simultaneously feeling both familiar and foreign. While we are intimately connected to them, they represent global processes that escape complete comprehension. They are complex chains of causality that have become inscrutable to individual perception. Invisible events cannot be addressed through individual images or shots. Instead, it's the montage techniques of demontage, soft montage, and the productive gap that I employ. It is these working methods that allow me to approach the invisible, partially capture it, and make it negotiable. These forms of montage are also mirrored in the written part of my dissertation. The written section of the doctorate brings together various text elements that influence each other and create cross-references within the individual works. The the written part contains conversations with other artist researchers contextualize my work within my field but also to build a forum to negotioate my work.

Unlearning Flow

Machining of Steel, Mating of Two Males, Dumdum Bullet Effect and String Figures played by the Inuit, the Krahô or the Taulipang in Guyana exemplify that the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen aimed at capturing all the movement processes of the world on celluloid. The biological, technical and ethnological films that the IWF produced, archived and distributed worldwide were supposed to be “documents of reality”. Without using commentary, they should make movements visible, storable and re-analyzable at any time.

Can there be pictures that are more real than others? The essay film Unlearning Flow examines both National Socialist prehistory and the legacy of the IWF. It reveals the ideology of the distant, objectifying camera view and also the active white washing of the Institute’s history after World War II. In addition, it establishes a link to the history of the building in which the institute was located until 1961. After the closure of the IWF, the building first became an object of speculation and then a shelter for refugees.

Due to copyright restrictions only an excerpt of the film can be shown here.

Title: Unlearning Flow

Year: 2019

Length: 10’ 06” (due to copyright regulations only an excerpt of the film can be shown here)

Director: Christoph Oeschger, Mario Schulze, Sarine Waltenspül

Camera: Christoph Oeschger

Editing: Christoph Oeschger

Voice: Ute Sengebusch

Sound Design / Music: Fabian Gutscher

Translation: Simon Cowper

Audio: Stereo

Format: HD Video

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