Alexander Horwath TABULA RASA AND BACK The Avant-Garde Films of Peter Tscherkassky Whoever began doing serious work with film and the avant-garde in the 1970s and early 1980s, as did Peter Tscherkassky, is currently confronted by a number of competing claims, situations and expectations which the medium is now hardly able to deal with: 1. The commonly accepted chronicle of modern art has in a sense reached a terminus – or a dead end. Similarly to conceptual art, which it was assumed would replace material artworks, avant-garde film has reached an "absolute zero" by dispensing with the material, the celluloid strip, and replacing it with an "Expanded Cinema." 2. Theory now seems to be a legitimate if not the "final" artistic act form. 3. In the 1960s, it was expected that the avant-garde would profit from a new hierarchy of values in the system of film genres in the same way as the art world, and this belief has proven to be illusory. 4. Attempts are being made to find in the history of film a "second," non-formalistic avant-garde with reference to feminism, neo-Marxism and psychoanalysis, and narration and figuration are gaining a new legitimacy as a result. 5. Video is now available to the art world as a "post-film" avant-garde (at least in a technological sense), and video art speaks TV, the new idiom of the masses (at least in a technological sense). 6. The music video channel MTV, founded in 1981, speaks to the masses quite fluently, and its "sales pitch" includes distorted, superficial vestiges of the history of avant-garde film. From the perspective of pure modernism, all these attempts tend toward the "post"-modern. Film has taken on the melancholy air of a prisoner on death row. But psychoanalysis now permits the use of new metaphors, such as the "magic slate" mentioned by Freud: The plastic film can be pulled up to delete what has just been written, as a sort of tabula rasa. At the same time, traces of everything previously written remain, offering opportunities. In this context, Peter Tscherkassky's post-1979 film oeuvre functions as a paradigm and reflects the crisis resulting from this confrontation. The opposite of an "erratic mass," and in no way a powerful, nonchalant confirmation of the artist's self, it represents a series of probing steps accompanied by a high level of reflection and is open to current discourse. This oeuvre contains various suggestions for "survival strategies" for avant-garde film: attempts to connect to and carry on a tradition, transitional solutions, painful self-examination, formulation and outlining of theories, celebration of the material itself, and reexamination of historical material. From the very beginning, Tscherkassky's films have had to come to terms with the fact that the historical process does not offer protection for past achievements. Fortunately, this applies to both deconstruction of the phantasms of progress in the field of art history and overcoming periods of depression and upheaval. As a result, apparent retreats can transform into liberating gestures in the reclamation of film as a medium, as has happened over the past twenty years. In Austria of the late 1970s, the Super 8 film format appeard as an artistic medium with wholly different pretensions as compared to the urban subcultures (New Wave or No Wave) in New York or Berlin. Young Austrian film artists – Tscherkassky, Dietmar Brehm, Lisl Ponger, etc. – employed Super 8 not as documentary affirmation of the scene, but as a sidestep. As a result, they were neither forced to renounce the rich tradition of Viennese avant-garde film, nor fall behind past achievements, nor hop on the new video bandwagon. The range of opportunities offered by Super 8, which have as yet gone unexploited, offers a fragile way out of the reductionistic dilemma, a path around the "absolute zero" of the modern period offered by trash: Criticism of the medium's materials can continue unabated, though we are back at the image (as it is a different image). Tscherkassky, 1995: "Super 8 was a microscope which allowed us to see beneath the skin of reality and make the internal lives of images visible in a way that was not possible with any other format. ... The best thing about it was the graininess. `Resolution´ is the technical term for the sharpness of the film image. Super 8 was above and beyond such niceties. In the harsh, crystal-clear light of a xenon projection, you could perceive a wholly different kind of resolution, in particular when the forms began to lose themselves in the grain and new and unexpected shapes emerged from seemingly amorphous clusters of bodies, only to be lost again in the colorful primordial soup. Super 8 was cinematography's pointillism, impressionism and abstract expressionism." Before Tscherkassky was able to celebrate the "private lives of images" without reservation, he was forced to deal with a series of issues and predecessors of the late modern period, which spare him the feared "anything goes," or simplistic post-modernism. Liebesfilm (1982), for example, is a later, harder and original return to structural film: a sobering ritual, a ritual intended to exorcise a cinematic ideology. A woman and a man lean into the picture from the strip of film's perforated edge, she from the left and he from the right, while a single frame of film prevents their lips from meeting. This movement is shown approximately 600 times, an obsessive repetition of the unrequited desire, an ur-image from conventional NRI (narrative, representational, industrial) film cast as a Sisyphean myth. In Urlaubsfilm (1983), the libidinous apparatus of the cinema is even more conspicuous. The desire for the "colorful primordial soup" of Super 8 images meets male voyeurism: Parts of a female body and voices are brought into a flirtatious relationship with the viewer and immediately withdrawn from his "access" by means of repeated rear projection. As a voyeur who is aware of his problem, the artist sets the border at which the (withdrawn) visual desire is transformed into a (throbbing) desire for the material. The art world of the 1980s declared that the "immaterial" media – video and computer-generated images – are the central issue. Peter Tscherkassky's extreme emphasis on the tangible, the "manufracture," can also be understood as a reaction to this change. The content of the images in Freeze Frame (1983) and the film's extremely aggressive style address this issue. Though the integrity of the individual frames is successively undermined, the material comes into its own in the destruction, the ruins. The frame melting in the projector's light at the end of the film supplies the appropriate formula of pathos. Motion Picture (1984) and Manufraktur (1985) are efforts to rescue the "materials," in part through references to the history of "industrial" film. But while the found footage from commercials used in Manufraktur – showing mostly women's legs and cars – are sped up to a furious pace on the optical printer, Tscherkassky also creates a new film space, thereby anticipating the techniques he employed in subsequent works. At the same time, Motion Picture once again explores the opportunities offered by conceptual film: A still taken from the very first Lumière film entitled Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) is "scanned" in a complex process and then reanimated. But the distance between the historical artifact and modern perception is unbridgeable: solely black and white spots are visible. The technique used by the artist is similar to digitalization of the existing image. As a result, Motion Picture, a film made at the dawn of the age of the personal computer, is also a prophetic comment on the change in paradigms in late 20th-century culture. Its consequences are entirely comparable to those triggercaused by the changes which took place around 1900, with which the name Lumière is synonymous. Workers leave the Lumière factory, the "factory of light," the film factory. In the "last" motion picture, they return one last time, trapped in the material, invisible, having been swallowed by the historical and the binary codes. In three separate steps, Tscherkassky advanced to the topic of "film theory and theory of the self," simultaneously switching from Super 8 to 16-mm and 35-mm film. Shot-Countershot (1987), tabula rasa (1987/89) and Parallel Space: Inter-View (1992) were influenced to a great degree by his reception of psychoanalytical film theory; at the time, he was undergoing psychoanalysis which lasted several years, and he attempted to apply these forms of knowledge and reflection to film in film and to his own role in the apparatus of desire. The visual brilliance of tabula rasa and Parallel Space is partly responsible for the increasing amount of recognition enjoyed by Tscherkassky's works in those years. At the same time, both films, with their "theoretical dramaturgy," explore the limits of what can be communicated through film. They touch upon the deepest underlying issues relating to film as well as those of the artist. But even these "deepest, darkest" matters can be expressed in images only, and for that reason, they lose their apparently ultimate validity. The white screen at the end of tabula rasa is, after all, just another image, to be specific one which glares outward, at us, at our place in the world and in film. From its very beginning, Parallel Space is devoted to a "physics of seeing" and a "physics of memory." For this purpose, Tscherkassky created solid and unique flicker effects and effects which simulate the separation and condensation of space. But the more the "self" postulated by the film and the viewer lose themselves in the collapsing images, the more fascinating the place which they find it finds there seems. The "physics" of sight incessantly leads the viewer back to the question of what there was to see. A phrase marks the end of the film: "looking for you." This obviously refers to others, the rest of the world, and a new or rediscovered visuality or sensuousness: film. Tscherkassky's workplace, the optical printer, does not destroy visuality and representation, it preserves and multiplies it. In the 1980s and early 1990s, work with found, or "recycled," footage, became the dominant technique used in (post-)avant-garde film throughout the world. The switch to found footage proved especially fruitful for Tscherkassky's work: He avoided the fashionable false assumptions, kept his sights set on his original goals with regard to reflection, and finally achieved a great deal of freedom and composure in his work with the medium – from Shot-Countershot, one of the best and most intelligent jokes in the history of film (theory), to the eerily terpsichorean homage to amateur films, Happy End (1996), and finally in his masterpiece, Outer Space (1999). Rather than distancing himself completely from NRI films, the traditional stance which often gave the avant-garde an aura of "frustration" and clearly demonstrated its fixation on the omnipotent Goliath, Hollywood was consciously welcomed: Don't be afraid, there's plenty to laugh about, but not necessarily to laugh at (this superficial attitude is a crass underestimation of the richness which can be found in "industrial" films). It would be better to laugh with these films, to be beautiful with their beauty, and to create new knowledge with their knowledge and unconscious elements. This work received additional stimulus from the current crisis involving the material itself, a result of the rapid switch being made throughout the sector to digital production, distribution and projection. In Tscherkassky's hands, the "industrial" 35-mm film became a body with visual and audio qualities which allows itself to be shaped and formed and expanded with a truly voluptuous desire. The opportunities specific to the material are not at all obsolete, nor have they been fully exploited, and they can be equally dramatic as the genre films and illusions for which the 35-mm strip normally serves as an "unconscious" vehicle. Outer Space makes use of the horror film The Entity: A woman (Barbara Hershey) enters her suburban home and is beaten by an invisible monster, an "external force." She fights back and waits for the next attack. Tscherkassky employs this rather conventional Hollywood story to tell his own tale: A woman enters her movie image where she is attacked by a "monster," an external force which is visible to the viewer only. This force is coarse reality, the area surrounding the image. She is threatened by the soundtrack's jagged trail of light, by the strip of perforation and the sounds of the "manufracture," by the sudden reproduction of her own image, by the perforation of her pictorial space, by the standstill of time within the film. The "monster" rampages, eliminating the woman from the picture. Its victory seems to be total, and the scene becomes quiet. But the woman then goes on the offensive and temporarily regains her integral reproduction and voice. The "monster" remains in standby mode. All the mirrors show the woman's reflection, and she keeps them in her field of view. The opponents look at one another with absorbed attention. They could be allies. Draw. This second story is materialistic, self-critical and crypto-feminist. And it is also an allegory. It tells us about that moment in the crisis at which the hero of the illusion and the modern artist-hero cease their blind attacks, when they suddenly recognize one another, their suppressed, opposite sides. One sees the reality (beyond the fiction); the other sees the reality of the fictional images. They could be allies. Draw. This text is based on a longer essay by Alexander Horwath: "Singing in the Rain. Superkinematografie von Peter Tscherkassky" © 2000