Gabriele Jutz The Physics of Seeing On Peter Tscherkassky's film "Parallel Space: Inter-View" "Parallel Space: Inter-View" was made using a still camera. The negative produced by a 35mm still camera corresponds exactly to the size of two film frames, and if the negative of a photograph is projected, two film frames are seen. With a photograph taken in a vertical frame position, first the upper and then the lower half of the image is projected. In this film, Peter Tscherkassky turns his attention to the perspective approach of the Renaissance, dominated for centuries by painting, and finally adopted in photography and film. The main characteristic of this perspective lies in the fact that it is aligned with the perception of the subject itself. By a gaze guided by the vanishing point, the observer appears to be master of what is seen. While the art of painting abandoned this illusionistic way of seeing at the beginning of the modern age, nevertheless, in the field of cinematography, it represents to this day a virtually uninvestigated basic condition. Originally, Tscherkassky planned a strictly formal film entirely in the anti-illusionistic tradition of the avant garde, in order to create the possibility of a new relationship between film and audience, similar to that existing in the fine arts. And indeed, within and by means of the standard visual process, the film subversively undermines the very system it uses, shatters the homogenous stereoscopic image and interweaves its vanishing points. The fact that it has not remained as formalism is proven by the choice of themes: memory and the worlds of images it produces, the inner film produced by memory and made accessible by psychoanalysis; television, computer and cinema images. In the course of the film, the two halves of the space are charged with significance. They are separate and yet simultaneous; simultaneous by virtue of having arisen in the still camera; separated by their projection in the cinema. This synchronous separation and simultaneity becomes a metaphor not only for the parallel worlds of the observer and that which is observed, the audience and the artist, man and woman, but also for the distance between the present and the past of the individual. "Parallel Space: Inter-View" begins with blackness, and on the soundtrack is heard the rustling of paper. A male voice begins to speak: "This is the message he left: 'Dear Tim! Thanks for the use of your space. I'm in a hurry, I have to go right away. Here is the new film. It's finished at last, as you can see. Originally it was going to be a strictly structural one, but it turned out to be one of the most personal I've made. Basically what I've tried to do was to ...'" During these final words, the sound fades out. A hand, by which the negative film material used becomes recognizable, pushes a rectangular white expanse from below into the frame. A powerful flickering effect is created, almost painful to the eye, as white and black expanses alternate from frame to frame. The flickering not only reveals the film strip, but also lights up the auditorium of the cinema, which seems to fill with the throbbing light emanating from the screen. The words spoken, in particular the sentence "This is the message he left" relate to the film which is then presented to the audience, to the absence of the artist and the presence of an audience (both reading and watching). In addition, there is mention of the "hired" space, a metaphor for the cinema itself. In all, the verbal statement, situated prominently at the beginning of the film, gives the illusion that there is a story, whereas what we actually see represents a massive contradiction of such a suggestion. No figurative image appears; the transition from representative to non-representative takes place before our very eyes, repeated again and again. Thus the representation of reality – one of the main characteristics of traditional cinema – is called into question. The word "Physics" is inscribed on the white rectangular surface, the side dimensions of which have a proportion of 1 to 1.33 in line with those of a classical cinema screen. Then, the hand pushes the sheet upwards out of the frame, making it visible in the second field of vision, where it remains. The "Parallel Space" of the film title now becomes visually comprehensible for the first time. In this way, through communication between the two neighbouring halves of the visual field, the basic themes of the film are expressed. On a second sheet are written the words "The Physics of Seeing". The first sheet – "Physics" – appears to be hovering like a gently flickering double exposure over the hand as it writes. The flickering effect is now lessened as white expanses become visible in both fields of vision. On a third sheet, the hand writes the words "The Physics of Memory". The diachrony of memory is now added to the synchronous act of seeing. More or less at the moment when the word "memory" appears, recordings of speech being played backwards are heard. The retrospective orientation of memory is thus acoustically underpinned. The next sequence takes us into the imaginary space of electronics. The paper and the dexterous, "physical" act of writing are now replaced by a computer screen, on which the words "All I remember is" appear in light writing. By this sentence, Tscherkassky again hints at the beginning of a story. The phrase which follows, "I was looking for you", gains from the double meaning of the English verb "to look for somebody", meaning both "to seek" – the private, intimate level of the film – and "to look on behalf of another" – the public plane. Of course it is the film maker who has been looking in place of the spectator, and he is now presenting in public the result of his observation. For a brief moment, the keyboard appears above the screen, representing the stock of letters from which all stories are written, the elements of the code before it is used. By way of visual counterpoint to a transfixed and purified memory, the passage which follows, dedicated to the act of remembering, shows images full of dust and dirt particles, transferred onto the film strip by Tscherkassky when developing the positive; both a flagrant infringement of the rules of cleanliness in the cinema to which we are accustomed, and yet also part of what distinguishes it from the medium of video. What we see are negative and positive shots of a couch and an armchair, covered respectively with black and white cloths so that, despite the positive and negative, they have the same brightness values. The couch and the armchair represent the setting for psychoanalysis, within which – identical in structure to the situation in the cinema – someone (analyst/audience) is attentively following the disparate images of an intimate story. Right through the film "Parallel Space: Inter-View", Tscherkassky communicates with positive and negative material, whereby he inserts the negative like the "unconscious side" of the film; as "murky" underground, upon which and from which the images of the cinema are empowered to come forth. In a mirror, again with side dimensions of 1 : 1.33, we see a window which has the effect of being a consolidation of the contrasting theorems of André Bazin: "The window is an open window on the world" and Christian Metz: "The screen is a mirror". Following this, the film maker himself appears in the mirror. Like an animated picture, he appears to hover between the armchair and the couch. The camera travels towards the mirror until the lens touches its surface. This "penetration" into the world of (mirror) images is accompanied acoustically by a piano chord. The light writing on the monitor continues; "I tried to follow, but I stumbled as that point vanished. I fell." At "as that", the monitor appears to fall through the space and onto the floor. In this section, "Parallel Space: Inter-View" plumbs the depths of the metaphorical richness of the English term "vanishing point". This is a point of orientation which, when it vanishes, causes one to stumble off-balance. The camera moves from the surface of the mirror back into the space. This is accompanied by a further piano chord, but it is now played backwards, and is heard as if we had arrived on the "other" side, like Alice in her topsy-turvy Wonderland. The mirror, in which we now again see the film maker, has become round and convex – an allusion to the famous painting by Parmigianino, "Self-portrait in convex mirror", which marked in art history the beginning of mannerism, and which put an end to the clear Renaissance concept of space based on a central perspective. With constant upward and downward panning movements, the camera travels back into the space. Its two halves move into one another. As it gets further away, the mirror, which is gliding to and fro between the two halves of the frame, comes increasingly to resemble a dot in the distance. It finally disappears behind the invisible joint which separates the frames on a 35 mm film strip (and here also, the two halves of the space). Then, just as if it were a distant memory, another image based on early central perspective, "La Cittá ideale", is pushed to and fro in the form of a photogram between the different parts of the frame. With the light writing "I fainted, got lost somewhere in between", the loss of the vanishing point is lamented as the loss of a kind of security, even though its nature is deceptive. "When I became conscious there was no body. You seemed to watch." Not only does this last line reinforce the illusory nature of seeing (the expressions "you see" and "you seemed" are more closely identified with one another by means of a pause before the letters "med" are added to "see"), but it also links up with the figure of the woman, who in the next take appears to be watching the film maker through a window from outside. She is not present as a body ("no body"), but as a look. This next episode, the theme of which is sexual disparity, is narrated through a combination of the creator's own work and found footage. Two monitors are placed one over the other in the parallel spaces. One is showing a sequence from Elia Kazan's "Wild River", which contains the archetypal acting out of the motif of the meeting of the sexes. On the other screen we see shots of the gazing woman, holding a mirror in which the film maker can be seen filming her. The classical arrangement of the watching camera, directed at the exhibit "woman", is here duly displaced. Instead, the object itself is left to express the potentiality and power of her own gaze. The two separate fields of vision are now defined as male and female areas. The two approach one other for just a brief moment, the woman penetrating the man's field. Immediately after this, we are beset by the memory of the time of Oedipal conflict, represented by the figure of a boy aged about seven positioned between man and woman. This boy now becomes the source of the gaze and that which is seen and experienced, which now returns to a re-enactment of the primal scene. The next and last stage leads us still further back to the days of early childhood, to the time of the "fantasy of the dismembered body" (Melanie Klein/Jacques Lacan), which lies before the development of a feeling of identity, and thus before the so-called "mirror stage". Tscherkassky inserts fragmented close-ups of a crying baby among images from which the act of sexual intercourse is hinted at, but not clearly recognizable. The optical recording of space with a central perspective is just as deceptive as the mirror image which gives the young child an ideal, identity-creating image of himself. "Parallel Space: Inter-View" anchors both the homogenous space and the subject, which is identical with itself, in the realm of memory, which it treats, however, with ambivalence. This is a film about the undermining of what was previously fixed into place, and it is the film itself which works at its own dissolution. We are left with a residue of longing.   Oedipus or The Geometry of Love Gabriele Jutz in conversation with Peter Tscherkassky Jutz: Why at this precise point in time have you made a film dealing with representations of perspective? Tscherkassky: I can still remember exactly how I got the idea for "Parallel Space". It was during some film presentation at the 1985 Berlin Film Festival. At that time I was spending a lot of time studying the reproduction of space in painting, the whole mimesis problem, from cave paintings, to the Greeks, and on to Cézanne. These studies were then included in my dissertation on film aesthetics. Shortly before that I had made "Manufraktur", a film which I made with found footage in the darkroom, directly copying 35 mm film strips onto unexposed material, and then I noticed that the photograph from a 35 mm camera is the same size as two cinema frames. "Manufraktur" includes a few sequences from a still camera. Anyway, in "Parallel Space", I wanted to deal with the question of perspective in the reproduction of space, by using the "correct" optics slightly "wrongly", meaning that I photograph correctly and project correctly, and then comes this fragmented space, which it is no longer possible to enter, outside which one is left standing, but one looks between the two newly created spaces. That's the reason for the phrase "Inter-View" in the title. But it is also intended to indicate the bipolar structure of the whole film, the interview as a dialogue. Jutz: So a period of eight years lies between the conception of the film and its final completion? Tscherkassky: I took the first shots in 1988, but I wasn't happy with them, discarded most of them and started again, was again unhappy, took long breaks and started back at the beginning again and again. Now the film consists of many "geological" layers. That's what I call the sequences which I adopted and used in the phases of its development. At the same time, this created its continuity, since when I took the new shots, I always reacted to the last thing I had recorded, "filming back", so to speak, into remembrance and the age at which I had had certain experiences. Jutz: "Parallel Space" is introduced in the spoken text as a very personal film. How are you able to relate your interest in the formal to this private plane? Tscherkassky: I took the first shots in an underground station because of the long, clear vanishing lines which exist there. Although it looked interesting, there was nothing more to it. Soon after that I started to interpret the two parts of the space in terms of content and to introduce these binary structures which shape our lives. From then it got really exciting. Instead of a geometric film, I began to make a film on the geometry of love. For the oldest sequence which is now in the film, I set up a couch for psychoanalysis and an analyst's chair and circled it with two tracking shots, negative from the left and positive from the right. I wanted to take this proximity between psychoanalysis and watching and making films as the starting point and then, facing backwards, to steer towards the most important points in my own development, along the lines of sexuality back via Oedipus to infanthood. That's the historical, diachronic plane. In the process of portrayal, it was important to me to break down spacial and chronological unity, because, you see, the photograph shows two areas of space photographed at the same moment. I interpreted this as the synchronism between myself and the outside world and between the present moment and memory. Jutz: Was the whole film made with a still camera? Tscherkassky: Basically, yes. But I also filmed with super 8, setting the camera up in a vertical frame position and then photographing the film frames. That's how I introduced constant movement into the film. I also transferred some parts from film to video and then wound on the video frame by frame, photographing each individually from the monitor. I did this wherever I wanted to show something like alienation, which was wherever the image is closer to us than the reality. Distance and closeness form one of the main themes of "Parallel Space". In the case of one sequence, I originally filmed with super 8 in a vertical frame position, where a man lies on a bed in the lower half of the frame, while in the background, in the upper half, a woman is getting undressed. I photographed this frame by frame and transferred the photographic strips onto video. Then I photographed the monitor so that it filled one half of the frame, and I left the other half dark, just photographing every second frame on the monitor, which was always only the woman. You just see a screen on which a woman is getting undressed. And then I briefly cut back to the film again and again, exactly in line with the flow of movement of the woman, and then the image springs back and suddenly also shows the man on the bed looking over at the woman. This gives the impression that his gaze is turning the woman into an image, to the picture on the monitor, and we are only briefly reminded of his space, that he too is there. Jutz: Who is "he"? Tscherkassky: He is the one who is watching, the one who can alienate himself by his gaze from his own person and from the world. The fear of the voyeur, of the film maker ... At any rate, this is an example of how, right through the film, I interpreted its formal structure in terms of content. Jutz: The monitor is one of the most frequently occurring visual motifs in "Parallel Space". To what extent is the relationship between film and video a theme? Tscherkassky: When Steve Anker, the head of the San Francisco Cinematheque, saw the film in its early version on the cutting table, he said that I have a great talent for conveying the physical aspect of film. Anker knows all my films, and so I was extremely happy to hear this comment. This physical aspect of the film strip, the substantiveness, that which is assailable, is really important to me, and I miss it with video. In "Parallel Space" I worked with all formats, and I had every single frame in my hand and actually felt it, and I hope that I was also able to communicate this special quality which belongs to film. The flickering effect is also one which can only exist in the cinema. It's not possible on a monitor. After a while, it begins to hurt your eyes, and that's why I structured the initial sequence like this: only black and white, the basic elements of film, and the audience is meant to feel how it pulsates through the room. For me, this physicality is what constitutes cinema. Although I examined these two light poles in "Aderlaß" ("Blood-letting") back in 1981, and this continued until "tabula rasa" in 1987, this film too begins with complete blackness and ends in pure white. Jutz: Are there any other connections between "Parallel Space: Inter-View" and "tabula rasa"? Tscherkassky: Very much so. They extend as far as the mirror I used, which is the same one as in "tabula rasa". Only, the manner in which the woman is looked at in "tabula rasa" is completely different. Maureen Turim said in a critical review that here, the woman as an exhibit is made into a fetish, and this is true, of course, although this fetishism is discernible in "tabula rasa" on a secondary plane. At any rate, in "Parallel Space", I sought the gaze of the woman back towards the camera, the gaze at that which she sees and which otherwise remains hidden, that is, the film maker in the process of creating his images. In addition to this, I didn't want an aesthetic of fetishism any more. That's why this film is much rougher on the surface. I developed almost all the material myself, with very rough grain. The super 8 material is Russian, developed with Czech chemicals, and the 35mm film is polyester-based, a material used in banks for surveillance, so it isn't exactly the latest from the Eastman Laboratories. Jutz: With "Parallel Space", were you able to add anything new, both in terms of form and content, to your previous work? Do you see this film as a further development of your work? Tscherkassky: I've used photographs in films before, but this time I really wanted to be able to show something of the relationship between the individual frame and the film strip. One sees several sequences twice, because the hand which writes the words at the beginning later shows individual series of frames again, this time as photographs. This is filmed again on negative film and the hand holds negative extracts which then appear positive. In the whole film, the negative is always presented as the actual background from which everything arises, and which then comments on that which has arisen from it. One sees how the film is composed of these frames, and how much each individual frame can reveal, as, for example, when in the "Wild River" section, at the moment when Lee Remick flings her arms around Montgomery Clift's neck, Clift reluctantly turns away for exactly five frames. And at the end of the film, I place two photograms from the initial text "I was looking for you" into both halves of the frame, containing the parts "I was" and "for you", which become a flickering "I was for you"; and then I again write "looking" on a sheet of paper and place it over the "I was", creating the phrase "looking for you", after which I cover the phrase "for you" with the word "looking", and in slow motion, the hand pushes the "looking" out of the frame so that only the complete blackness of the beginning remains. I love these sequences. Altogether, the film was a forceps delivery, for there were times when I hated it, but I always knew that it would be completed one day, and today many people whose judgment I count on consider it to be my best film.  taken from: blimp – fim magazine, No. 22/23, Graz 1993 Gabriele Jutz studied Romance languages and literature and history at Salzburg, and film studies in Paris (Metz, Aumont, Colin). Dissertation on images of history in French cinema; research project for the FWF: "Women in Film"; lectureships at the universities of Salzburg and Vienna; 1991, professor of film at the Freie University Berlin; collaboration in the research project "Intercultural and intra-cultural communication" run by the Akademie der Wissenschaften (area of work: national forms of presentation in French and Austrian TV); numerous publications in the realm of film theory, film history and semiotics. Teaches film theory at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna.