Frozen Flashes, Silent Screams
for Dore O. (1946-2022)
A BODY was found in the Ruhr river last week, discovered by a pair of fishermen underneath the Kassenberg footbridge. A resident of the adjacent town of Mülheim an der Ruhr had been missing for weeks. The official alert issued by police described the missing person as a 75 year-old woman with white hair, sie ist leicht dement und nicht gut zu Fuß - having slight dementia and not being good on her feet. One witness claimed they had seen someone matching that description wandering in a nearby meadow days earlier, but organized search parties and helicopter sweeps would reveal nothing. On March 8th the Mülheim police confirmed what they called a “sad suspicion”. Her name in the news was Dorothea Alwine N. (for Nekes, the surname of her late husband Werner.) Her maiden name had been Oberloskamp. Soon people began to realize she was Dore O., one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of the last half-century.
It’s not clear what happened. While it’s never guaranteed any artist will be properly celebrated within their lifetime, Dore was as close to a second renown as she had been in the second half of her career. She had worked closely with the Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin to restore her first six films, which were released last fall by the French label Re:Voir on a DVD called “Figures of Absence: The Films of Dore O.”1 (I believe North American retrospectives were and still are in the works.) She had gallery representation at Ricarda Fox, who hosted a 2017 show spotlighting her work with physical media - creating sculptures out of celluloid film strips, silhouetting and double (as well as triple) exposing photographs shot on different formats. Verband der Deutschen Filmkritik (the Association of German Film Critics) had announced just a few weeks earlier that Dore was the 2022 honoree of their annual prize, with public events to follow. This was, in fact, looking like a breakthrough moment.
In 1968 Dore was, alongside her husband Werner Nekes, one of the cofounders of the highly influential Hamburg Filmmakers Co-Op. (You can see a wonderful spread of photographs from those heady days of hippie cine-activism here.) She was a fixture of Oberhausen and the Berlinale, and premiered new work art the fifth (1972) and sixth (1977) editions of the Documenta festival of contemporary art, in Kassel. Like Nekes, her work is known to boomer travelers of the postwar avant-garde scene, yet little-discussed today outside of Europe, and never properly distributed in the States. The list of decorations feels a bit defensive, because her death should be a bigger story - but then, not much was published about Dore in English during her life.
Her output over the course of her lifetime was arguably eclipsed by that of Nekes, who had a prodigious career and travelled with Dore throughout the 1970s. But their story does not suit the cliche of a lopsided or exploitative marriage-rivalry between creatives; they worked on each other’s films in a variety of configurations, she as actress, he as cinematographer, and so on. Their very first short Jüm-Jüm (1967) shows a girl - Dore - in profile, swinging back and forth against an unmistakable phallic painting-as-wallpaper. The jarring symbolism immediately takes a backseat to the staccato editing as Dore jumps from one side of the screen to the other in mid-swing. The couple’s only other shared credit is 1980’s Beuys, a single-shot portrait of the eponymous artist (one of their contemporaries, like Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren or VALIE-EXPORT) in ten minutes, with his back turned to the camera the entire time.
I stumbled upon a cute souvenir, a digitized tape of a discussion with Dore and Werner held after a screening at Oakland’s Carnegie Museum of Art in 1974. It’s mostly plodding and dull, yet a priceless artifact nevertheless, because it offers a chance to see real-time footage of the couple together, and is Dore’s only English-language interview I’ve yet found. That said, it’s a 46 minute segment and she speaks for probably six minutes tops. Nekes describes being influenced by concrete poetry, and disavows distinctions like “narrative” or “experimental” film. You can hear insufferable audience questions laden with quasi-academic jargon (“malleability”, “functionality”, “the filmic process”, “fixed time”, “perceptual as opposed to theoretical differences”, and so on), proof positive little has changed in the post-film Q+A experience. But it’s hard not to fault them for asking, really, and Dore’s language is strong, sound, simple: Kaskara is a film shot at the summer cottage she shared with Nekes, and so she talks about using cinematographic processes to “build new rooms” inside the house. Dore stresses the impossibility of making a film that isn’t personal, and the importance of form and meaning as one and the same.
Dore used an evolving roster of tools common to expanded cinema: superimposition, painting-on-film, double exposure, reversal, mattes, rack focuses, projecting images on surfaces in order to create new ones. Dore and Werner shared an obsession with the history of optics, and his collection of ancient photographic equipment has attracted posthumous interest in its own right2. Dore’s films demand to be seen, not summarized3. Putting them into words feels pointless - although one audience member likens the act of watching Kaskara to being driven cross-eyed, not a bad description. The work is radically subjective, sensual, psychedelic, insinuating, structural; Dore was pushing against both the conventional and the stridently doctrinaire political filmmaking styles that dominated the ‘60s and ‘70s. She portrays states of dysfunction and obfuscation: memories not lining up, ostensibly parallel images not matching up, hands grasping in a void, vertiginous staircases, impossible vantages. Later in life, Dore would write the following description of her work at large:
Landscape exists only as a view through windows and doors, individual images are in opposition to themselves, growing closer together or dissolving into each other. Besides compressed images, the breaking of spaces and of course time, there are shots which have been left undoctored. Attraction, amalgamation, and removal of half of the image with the goal of a sensual topology are the principal formal means of the chosen language. One image devours the other.
It would be a mistake to situate Dore’s work within what is traditionally called “feminist film”, or to say her hazy dreamstates are exclusively rooted in trauma. But the perspective is singular, and the films often deploy female bodies (including her own) opposite landscapes and within domiciles to explore relationships, spatial or otherwise. Blindman’s Ball (1988) uses double projection to interrogate touch and the decay of memory vis-a-vis a faceless nurse attending to a feverish, bedridden man4. Adapted from Flemish woodcut artist Franz Masereel’s 1920 “wordless novel” (comic book) The Idea, Dore’s miniature epic Candida (1992) uses dizzying cinematography to depict an imprisoned female spirit which travels as freely by leaps and bounds as it is ensnared and enclosed by the confines of heterosexual romantic relationships. Even as her methods grew more sophisticated and her budgets a bit bigger, it’s impossible to ignore the feeling you’re watching life cascade into art (and imagining the reverse.)
I first encountered mention of Dore O. in a used paperback copy of Polemics For A New Cinema, an obscure collection of writings by the Australian filmmaker-programmer-critic-theorist Albie Thoms, whose career anticipated the more famous “Australian New Wave” made famous by Peter Weir, Fred Schipesi and Phillip Noyce. Polemics For A New Cinema was in a dusty pile of acquisitions at Topos, the used bookstore where I worked in Queens; the founders of Topos were friends I had made volunteering at Spectacle. After checking out some low-quality clips of the films on Youtube, I contacted Dore directly. She was happy to send me a DVD of her near-complete filmography which had been quietly available for purchase on her little corner of the internet. (You can see an archived, fractured version of Dore’s old website here; the more recent update is dore-o-nekes.de, which consolidates both artists’ CVs.) Without these connections - fraught, interpersonal, anecdotal - I never would have known about Dore O., and to my knowledge the 2016 Spectacle retrospective is the only comprehensive survey of her work exhibited in North America.
It’s always depressing when an obituary reads as too ready; I haven’t seen the documentary Obit, about the New York Times’ process for preparing them in advance, but sometimes what’s meant as a survey-tribute reads more like a shadow diagram of the departed’s supposed importance, along with a retelling of the most storied accomplishments and/or episodes of their life. Yet it’s more depressing when nothing is published at all. I hope Dore is recognized somewhere - Criterion? Artforum? Millennium Film Journal5? Cinema Scope? - in the coming weeks. We never met in person, but while working with her via email over the years, a certain connection took place. Dore was not a brand, she was not hidden behind a management firm or a distribution company, she had no entourage of assistants. She was accessible, but shy - I don’t think she ever replied directly to any of my queries about a printed interview or a Zoom discussion. When news of her death circulated, most articles used a photo from 2019, but my sense is Dore preferred being shot from behind6. Her films, and the materials (postcards, a poster, the DVD booklet) she sent me over the years, usually featured images of her with her back turned to the camera. But what if it wasn’t Dore O.? The films live in the realm of fairy tales and dreams, hallucinations and half-remembrances; the point seemed that she could have been any girl, any woman.
Current Mood: Sad 💔
Current Music: Cio D’or - Off
These efforts are, from what I can tell, the result of one person’s labor entirely: Masha Matzke, of the Deutsche Kinemathek.
For more info on this, I recommend “Media Archaeology as Film Practice” by Helena Gouveia Monteiro, of the University of Lausanne.
See my otherwise bombastic program notes from our 2016 screenings: “This is a playful and often freefalling visual poetics, best left to wash over you pure and analyzed later (or better yet, not at all.”)
Dore’s description, from a 1992 presentation at the San Francisco Cinematheque: “The situation of lying and fevering creates a fantasy and dream world - reality shatters in thousands of mirrors, which show the life, work and memory of the sick in facets."
My friend Vera Dika wrote an incisive appreciation of Dore’s work last year for MFJ which ended up being quoted at length in the Re:Voir DVD, but it is paywalled.
Her official portraits for the Ricarda Fox Galerie website bear this out, including the one at the header of this essay.