Oberhausen Through the Lens of a Cameraman

PART 1: EXTERIOR

A cameraman’s eye is always looking for what is beautiful in a given place. This is easy in large industrial spaces. They have a geometric grandeur which is poetic. The logic of utility becomes visible as beauty: in recurrence, symmetry, proportion - as with the golden ratio or fractals. Simply put, beauty in truth rather than perfection. Such compositions, mathematics made manifest, evoke a sense of internal order that resonates instinctively with human perception, just as visual composition or musical harmony does. Of course, this is a filmmaker’s dream. Vast choreographies of steel and shadow, depth and breadth (literal and figurative), where light, texture, and scale compose themselves without asking to be art, and yet. . .

On first sight of Oberhaussen, my reaction was a sustained low-octave: ‘Wooooah’. As if I’d stepped into a living gallery of industrial aesthetics, where filmic possibilities were everywhere. If I don’t get great footage, here, I thought, it really is on me. Which cued a flicker of useful anxiety - the kind that energises; so, let’s go get great footage, then. Or try to.

Exiting the Hauptbahnhof, right away one sees der Wasserturm, the old water tower built above the station concourse, that previously had served steam engines but now was a repurposed art space and culture centre - a hub for the Epic-Up project (that I was here to document), no less. This giant vertical redbrick projects forty metres or so, recalling both lighthouse and fortress - monumental, a little intimidating, and emanating an undeniable raw aesthetic power. I set up my camera. I got as many angles as I could, my mind cycling through speculations of what it was like inside. Admittedly, it was hard to picture, for the facade by necessity seeks to conceal, not reveal. That lent some mystery to it, and I was that was pleasing from a filmic view, because I knew my own curiosity would translate to the viewer. I capped my lens and put the thought aside for the moment. Today was the day for exterior shots. The visual groundwork on which a video is built. And so, off I marched across the city, lugging my various bags of camera gear toward the canals, toward the quiet industrial edge.

Within five minutes of leaving the station, one can clearly see the old Gasometer — a vast steel drum, 117.5 metres tall. With the Gasometer as a lodestar, I followed the edge of the rail lines, filming occasionally: the freight trains and the motorway, extant arteries of industry. The Gasometer was important both to the city and to the film. Like the Water Tower, it has been repurposed as a cultural centre - but of an unprecedented scale. Not only is the Gasometer one of the most striking and emblematic industrial conversions in the Ruhrgebiet, it is, to my mind, one of Europe’s most dramatic exhibition spaces, a veritable monument of labour transformed into a temple of art. The keyword here is ‘transformed’; for this, what I saw everywhere in Oberhausen: a state of transition. The adaptive reuse of industrial sites enables cultural metamorphosis. What once served extraction and pollution now engages reflection and creativity - while (and this is very important) sustaining continuity with local identity. Such projects, where artefacts of industry become engines of culture, narrate recovery without erasure, and they, like the Gasometer, as beacons of reinvention and resilience.

Local identity in Oberhausen is interesting. When you arrive there, instantly you can see that this is no Old World city with ancient heritage. The architecture is a collage of modernist, industrial, and post-war functional. Everything dates from the mid-19th century, more or less. No Renaissance market square to be found. Indeed, there was no city here at all until industry was established. The people were brought in, and from everywhere: Silesia, Poland, the Rhineland, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, and, later, from Syria, Ukraine, and West Africa. From the get-go, even within Germany, most residents were newcomers seeking work. Oberhausen is a city built by migrants for industry, a place where ‘local’, really, means someone who stayed. And you see this heterogeneity everywhere in various cadences of city life. In the market stalls on Marktstraße, where Turkish grocers sell Polish pickles beside Italian olives, in cafés run by families whose roots reach to half of Europe. Where one finds a surprising abundance of barber shops, reflecting the social nodes of the Turkish, Kurdish, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian (among other) communities, distinct by their sharp haircuts and neatly shaped beards. Oberhausen is a cultural mosaic, and rich for it; here, stability arises from continual renewal, not from sameness.

The above I gleaned from simply wandering around the city for a few hours, occasionally chatting with people on the street - strangers, all of whom were very friendly and open. They weren’t at all reticent from the camera, which makes my job easier. They approached me in fact, curious about what I was up to with this massive tripod setup. Besides this, people smiled. A lot. Now this makes my job a whole lot easier. In my trade, a genuine smile is gold, it makes a film come alive - a real smile tells a deep story - and is scarce to acquire. Actually, mostly, people tend to clam up in front of the lens. It can have a strange, disorienting effect (to which I’m certainly susceptible); it makes people act weird. In Oberhausen, general immunity seemed in play, which put me more at ease, allowing me to tune closer to the rhythm of the city. An added bonus, what I’d not expected at all, was the distinctly jokey manner people presented. I’ve filmed in Germany many times in many contexts, but never in the Ruhr. People here exhibited a particular levity which I’d not seen elsewhere. German people are always friendly in my experience, but not always so, well, silly. There was a kind of everyday playfulness - direct but benevolent - in all quarters. And this, directed at some odd stranger with a camera and not a word of German in his command.

- Written by Chris Murnaghan

Photos: Svitlana Iziumska