Oberhausen Film Festival's 'From the Deep' Explores Pre-World War I European Cinema

The 56th Oberhausen Film Festival in 2010 featured a curated program titled 'From the Deep', focusing on European films from 1898 to 1918, with an emphasis on 1905–1910. Curated by Mariann Lewinsky and Eric de Kuyper, the selection included chase films, short narratives, magic films, actualités, and scènes de l’industrie, showcasing early cinema's diversity before standardization. Films like La Grève des nourrices (1907) by Pathé depicted social reversals, such as wet nurses striking in a French town, while Paris inondé (1910) by Gaumont documented the Paris floods. The program rejected the term 'primitive cinema', instead framing these works as from 'another continent' to highlight discontinuities with post-World War I filmmaking. It emphasized documentary lineages and themes like colonialism, gender roles, and industrialization, drawing connections to avant-garde practices. The festival also included Ian White's 'There Is No Self' talks, and references were made to Miriam Hansen's scholarship on early cinema audiences. The films, preserved by institutions like the Nederlands Filmmuseum, were shown with minimal contextualization, leading to a sense of repetition but offering specialists a rich view of pre-war social and aesthetic playfulness.