arsenal 3 in March: Odd Ones Out – Films from the archive of the Short Film Festival Oberhausen whose histories have not yet been written

The archive of the Short Film Festival Oberhausen is a “prize-winners’ archive,” meaning that the prints' existence in this archive is generally thanks to their having been awarded a festival prize, whether by the International Jury or one of the independent juries considered to be significant. Having a place in the archive was not, however, a guarantee of lasting attention. While some of those film prints remained in circulation, at least temporarily, on the programs of film clubs or educational institutions, and others were shown in retrospectives to represent milestones in the festival’s history, others stayed largely unnoticed.

The running card of each film print provides information about how often it was borrowed and shown, and by whom. If a film had a commercial distributor or was distributed by a national film archive, the Oberhausen print was usually one among many and was rather irrelevant to the afterlife of that film. It is different, of course, if the print archived in Oberhausen was one of only a few of that film, or if it became a unique specimen over the years due to losses elsewhere or the conversion of other institutions to digital formats.