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Rhys Graham
OUTERSPACE:
The Manufactured Film Of Peter Tscherkassky
In half-light and fractured, staggering visuals, a young woman enters
into a suburban house at night. As the door closes behind her, both
the physical space and the surface of the projection begin to splinter,
collapse and rupture. Spaces enclose and enfold, the female subject
multiples and shatters across the screen, and the film itself screeches
and tears as the sprockets and optical soundtrack violently invade
the fictional world. Any semblance of a cinematic narrative is overwhelmed
and assaulted, leaving it scattered in a thousand shards amid an
entirely unique cinematic language. This is Peter Tscherkassky¼s
Outerspace. It is the most recent work of a filmmaker at the forefront
of avant-garde film practice. And in its sheer filmic materiality
it may seem to be an anachronism in a time of hype about new technological
modes. Yet, Tscherkassky, strictly working in film as he has done
for over two decades, continues to employ celluloid as a singular
material with which to investigate theories of subjectivity, memory
and perception, as well as the aesthetic limits of the cinematographic
image. Tscherkassky sculpts with time and space, rhythms and arrhythmia
in a way that feels like an entirely new film space, a new language
altogether.
As such, Outerspace is difficult to compare to any other style
of film. It is the kind of violent brilliance that mainstream films
such as Fight Club (1999) and Se7en (1995) attempt to appropriate
in their mimicry of optically printed experimental styles. It is
extraordinarily intense and, though only ten minutes in length,
relentless in its sensory assault. At the same time, shot in 35mm
cinemascope Outerspace is quite simply, a lush cinematic production.
Horror buffs will recognise the woman in the opening moments of
the film as Barbara Hershey from Sidney J. Furie¼s 1981 film The
Entity. In the original film, Hershey is cast in the role of a woman
possessed by a violent spiritual force. In Tscherkassky¼s masterful
and playful reworking of the original footage, different sequences
displaying the violence of this possession are used to reinforce
the crisis that occurs at the surface level of the image. The woman
is sent smashing from wall to wall, her face splintering across
screen, flashing in ghostly traces or exploding into numerous directions.
At one point she dissolves on screen leaving an empty corridor,
then suddenly she explodes again into the frame. Her screams are
punctured by the scratches and glitches of the torn film, of the
sprocket holes that bleed across the screen, or the mechanical groan
of the optical soundtrack as it forces any narrative from the screen
altogether. As the crisis reaches its peak, the woman suddenly smashes
a mirror and there is a brief respite. A small calm. At this point
Tscherkassky is playfully exploding the notion of "film as a mirror"
articulated by Christian Metz which was, in turn, stated in opposition
to Bazin¼s narrative concerned statement that film is a window to
the world. As he fragments Metz, who before him fragmented Bazin,
we know that Tscherkassky is searching for something more.
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The immersive experience of the film is marked by a collapse
between the world of the frame, and the mechanics of filming
and projection. It is as if Tscherkassky is suggesting that
there is a potential violence restrained by every film frame.
An explosion of off-screen energy that can shatter the veneer
of the film form. The expression of this shattering is a deeply
sensual experience which implicates and surrounds the viewer.
The constant layering of images also creates a space in which
the viewer is able to insert themselves, no longer withheld
by the pretense that this is a separate world presented on
screen. Rather, it is something immediate and tangible which
can be destroyed in the act of viewing, and then created again
in an abstract rhythm of torn sound and image fragments. This
is not simply an act of subversion, but something like the
fractured cut and paste ethics of avant-garde composers; a
mode of using the violent rhythms of delay, rupture, fragmentation,
looping and degraded image and sound. It is a style more aligned
with the abstract cut and paste density of contemporary musicians
such as Kid 606 and Matmos than the careful superficiality
of most cinema.
Tscherkassky¼s film has always been a meeting point of cogent
theoretical preoccupations and a kind of anarchic punk energy.
His first explorations in film were an inspiration and inheritance
propelled by the films of Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka and the
Vienna Actionists. Although one of his earlier super-8 films,
Aderlass (Bloodletting ‚ 1981) took the confronting performances
of the Actionists as its model, it was Kren and Kubelka¼s
concern with the materiality of film that would continue to
inform his own work. In works such as Urlaubsfilm (1983),
Freezeframe (1983), and Manufraktur (1985) Tscherkassky is
interested in the limits to which film can be subjected to
degradation and dissolution via refilming, layering and imposition,
and visual fragmentation. But the rhythms of fracturing the
sound and image are so precise as to never appear random.
Commonly, as in Outerspace, Tscherkassky begins from a state
of calm ‚ a black or white screen, or a coherent piece of
found footage ‚ which he then takes to the edge of absolute
destruction via processes of degradation and splintering,
only to return the viewer to a state of calm, their senses
bombarded with a new awareness of the possibility of film.
These works are a frustrated resurrection of the material
which has been placed at the service of the staid traditions
of narrative language and conventions. Roman Jakobson wrote
that "in order to show an object, it is necessary to deform
the shape it used to have" (1) and this is precisely Tscherkassky¼s
concern.
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Another defining element is his use of found footage, from the
work of the LumiÈre Brothers to home movies and studio melodramas
or horror films. The use of previously existing source film is increasingly
common to artists whose devotion to the medium is as much a reaction
to the prevailing artistic climate as it is a continuation of a
century of cinematic experimentation. Tscherkassky himself expressed
the revival of found footage filmmaking as a "responseä from a technological
standpoint, to the overwhelming presence of electronic imagery:
a conscious return to the artistic specificity of the medium¼s historical
expression." (2) Other artists in the influential Austrian avant-garde
scene such as Lisly Ponger, Dietmar Brehm and Gustav Deutsch ‚ many
of whose works are supported and distributed by Sixpack Films, an
organisation Tscherkassky founded a decade ago ‚ are similarly intrigued
by the meeting point between the materiality of film and its history
as an aesthetic form. Indeed, some of Tscherkassky¼s work borders
on a reverence for the history of film as a plastic material. Motion
Picture (1984) is a visually bizarre but theoretically intriguing
film in which Tscherkassky laid out foot long strips of film in
a grid. Upon this grid he then exposed a still image from the very
first piece of film ever exposed: the LumiÈre¼s La Sortie des Ouvriers
de l¼usine LumiËre ý Lyon (1895). The result was that tiny divisions
of the black and white image exposed each frame, and the projected
film was like a binary map of strobing light, meaningless without
the idea behind it. To some a film should speak for itself, but
for Tscherkassky the presence of the filmmaker and the traces and
resonances of their production is a defining element of avant-garde
cinema. The manual processes of production should not only remain
undisguised but should be brought to the fore so that the filmmaker
and viewer meet actively, redefining and reassembling the manufactured
splinters of the filmmaking process.
There is little doubt that the filmic work of Austrian Peter Tscherkassky
is confounding. This is not because it is fundamentally abstruse
in its meaning or avoids placement within a context of cinematic
practice. Tscherkassky distils his theoretical concerns into bold
but specific statements about the medium and the manufacture of
film. And his films develop on modes of expression that can be traced
within a recent history of structural and avant-garde film practice.
Tscherkassky¼s films are confounding because on the one hand, they
can be explosively violent ruptures of the usual artifice of cinema,
and on the other, they are sensually overwhelming, seductive experiences
to which it is very pleasurable (and often physically staggering)
to surrender to. And, they confound, because, in this very act of
surrendering to the image, one is working against one of Tscherkassky¼s
primary concerns, which is to explore and expose the limits of the
physical and intellectual mechanisms that constitute "film".
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Jakobson, Roman, "On Realism in Art",
Language in Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987, p. 26
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2
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Tscherkassky, Peter, "A Poet of Images
‚ the work of Matthias M¸ller", XXXVI Mostra Internationale
del Nuovo Cinema, Pesaro Film Festival 2000 Catalogue
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Outer Space (1999 Austria 14 mins)
Source: CAC/NLA Prod Co: P.O.E.T. Picture Filmmaker: Peter Tscherkassky
© Rhys Graham, January 2001
Rhys Graham is a filmmaker and writer based in Melbourne.
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