Her Name Was Europa (Anja Dornieden & Juan David González Monroy, 2020)

Here's a hypothesis. Just as Stan Brakhage was the defining figure in experimental film for a particular generation, and Hollis Frampton sort of became the dominant figure for the subsequent generation, we are going to look back at this period in avant-garde cinema and determine that, despite the obvious pluralism that characterizes our moment, a great deal of the dominant work in the field seems to coalesce around one figure: Harun Farocki.

Consider how many works are made in the essay-film mode today, and how many of them understand Farocki's institutional and historical inquiries into cinematic meaning to be fundamental to their aims. So many films today take Farocki as an axiom. You can't just analyze something. You have to analyze the way that cinematic discourse has constructed that object, and how social institutions have conditioned the availability of the object and its discourse. In a sense, Farocki is as close as the cinema came to producing its own Michel Foucault. 

The German duo of Donieden and González Monroy, who work collectively as OJOBOCA, have been working for a decade now, producing wry social documents pertaining to media history and the production of subject positions. Their latest film is an exceptional example of research cinema; it tackles a seemingly insignificant question or bizarre historical footnote, and follows it where it leads. In this case, the topic is the aurochs, an extinct ancestor of the cow that a Nazi zoologist, Lutz Heck, decided to recreate through "back-breeding," a selective eugenics process whereby lost traits would be reintroduced into the genetic line with the aim of reversing evolution to a primeval state.

What the OJOBOCA team discover is that a strain of aurochs survived the Allied bombing of Berlin, and Dutch geneticists kept them alive and continued breeding them. Using 16mm film and silent-film style intertitles (themselves markers of an "extinct" form of cinema), Donieden and González Monroy display the crisis at the heart of the modern zoo itself -- a colonialist project that turns living things into display items. From there, it is not a big leap to constructing nature itself, preserving the dying and resurrecting the dead. As Her Name Was Europa makes abundantly clear, this is also the dream of cinema, which suggests that perhaps all of 20th century modernity has in fact been "death at work."