Oblivion (2006)

Directed by: Stephen Dwoskin | 78 minutes | drama | Actors: Stephen Dwoskin, Ana Benegas, Beatrice Cordua, Maggie Jennings, Annabelle Loveday, Johanna Pauline Maier, Carola Regnier

Oblivion means oblivion and is the most recent film by experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin. Dwoskin graduated from Parsens Art Academy in New York and has been involved in film since 1959. He teaches at various universities around the world. He is also the author of the influential book Film Is (1975) on the history of avant-garde film.

The avant-garde cinema has a hermetic character. It pretends to break with the boundaries of conventional film in form and content. That makes the reception of these kinds of films mainly a matter of insiders. Dwoskin has been active in this genre for over forty years. His stories have little narrative structure. They are fragmentary personal observations interspersed with fascinations and obsessions of the human body.

The obsession for the decay of the female body is central to ‘Oblivion’. The film is a series of close-ups of faces and body parts. The male (barely visible) protagonist is played by Dwoskin himself, as in all his films. Lying on the bed or from a wheelchair, the man watches the women. In addition, the man in the film has an extra communicative disability because he cannot speak. The images of women ranging in age from quite young to middle-aged sometimes appear pornographic and also especially hallucinatory.

Stephen Dwoskin contracted polio at the age of four and ended up in a wheelchair from then on. His handicapped state forms the breeding ground for his experience. In an interview, Dwoskin says: disability is really an absurd situation. Sometimes it seems as if you are hallucinating. You must not remain silent in that altered state of consciousness. If you do that, you lose your own identity.

Dwoskin’s oeuvre theme is his inner world full of obsessions and powerlessness. On a deeper level one could say that his egodocuments do not serve to realize a more universal feeling, but all universal problems in Dwoskin are reduced to personal proportions.

Although Dwoskin’s minimalism is daring and consistent and perhaps mandatory for film academics, for those without avant-garde glasses it does make for very poor cinema.