Peter Tscherkassky
Alexander Horwath and Michael Loebenstein,
Eds.
Filmmuseum Synema Publikationen, Wien,
2005
253pp. Paper, €18
ISBN: 3-901644-16-4.
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication &
Culture. Georgia Institute of Technology
eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
Once, when I was at a media festival in
Germany, someone told me that the "avant-garde"
response to digital media was one of two
kinds: that which derived from Michael
Snow, and that which derived from Stan
Brakhage (or was it Peter Kubelka?...).
I thought the statement was rather weird,
though generous, given that Snow was actually
in attendance at the festival, and that
a great deal of the new film work being
shown was heavily formalist. Nevertheless,
I assume the person meant that these two
trajectories in avant-garde cinemaone
formal and structural, the
other material and, well, "destructural"have
had a resurgence in the era of digital
film, DV, Flash, Director, and so on.
Not being a film scholar, I let the statement
pass on.
But I was reminded of these thoughts when
I first saw a suggestively titled, short
film called Outer Space. It was
on a DVD that I rented, along with other
contemporary avant-garde shorts, all of
which reinvented or re-purposed the horror
genre in some way. I remember being completely
taken by this film, the director of which
had a long name that, for the longest
time after returning the DVD, I was always
forgetting or getting wrong. The director,
of course, was (and is) Peter Tscherkassky.
The filmOuter Spacemade
such an impression on me, primarily because
I was totally engaged in the film
while, at the same time, totally aware
of the filmas film.
Now, this is arguably a characteristic
of all avant-garde film, at once brining
the viewer in while at the same time disrupting
their immersion through the use of techniques
both standard and non-standard. But Outer
Space, like Tscherkasskys other
films, is very "digital"and
yet made by cutting and splicing 35mm
film.
Let me stick with Outer Space,
since its the film Im most
familiar with. It constitutes part of
a Cinemascope trilogy in black
and white. The film itself is mostly appropriated
from a 1983 horror film The Entity
(staring Barbara Hershey
), in which
a woman is attacked by an invisible ghost.
Tscherkassky radically re-works the original,
and what results is a 15-minute hallucinatory
piece that can only be described as "filmic
demonology." "Invasions"
of all sorts occupy the film, and the
frames from the original begin to reference
other genres, including science fiction,
the psychological thriller, even, in a
strange way, melodrama. But the way in
which Outer Space does this is
by the intrusion of film itself into the
film. There are many struggles: between
narrative and abstraction, between the
woman and the film material itself, and,
as editor Horwath notes, a struggle for
spacethe space of photography,
the space of film. Both Man Ray and Vertov
haunt this piece.
Outer Space is nearly film.
I say this in a double sense: It presents
us with fragments of a narrative from
which we can glean only the most general
affects (violence, possession, the demonic),
but we dont know what the story
is (or the plot, for that matter). It
is also "nearly" a film because,
as a medium, the film itself seems to
be constantly on the verge of "breaking
down" (can the material of film have
a nervous breakdown?), always unstable,
skittish, and frenetic. Nearly a narrative,
nearly a medium. Outer Space is,
however, only one work in Tscherkassys
overall output. The monograph devotes
considerate space to Tscherkasskys
early Super-8 shorts and his interest
in body and performance, as well as to
his interest in psychoanalysis, music,
avant-garde film, and appropriation.
Ive been wishing that a DVD collection
of Tscherkasskys work might be made
available (with the appropriate region
code
), but in the meantime Ive
been paging through the monograph of his
work, recently published by Synema/Filmmuseum.
The book contains extensive documentation
of Tscherkasskys films, including
several sections of high-quality, glossy
color stills. The essaysin
German and Englishinclude
an introduction to Tscherkassys
work by editor Horwath (contextualizing
his work in relation to avant-garde film),
and fascinating essay by Drehli Robnik
(a reading of Tscherkassys Instructions
for a Light and Sound Machine as a
"messianic materialism"), and
an extensive, personal meditation on photography
and film by Tscherkassky himself. So,
until the DVD is released, this book will
be more than enough to occupy my interests.
To return to my opening: Tscherkassys
"response" to digital media
is not simply one of digital formalism,
nor is it one of a nostalgic "return"
to the purity of film itself. There is
always a struggle with the medium, as
if the materiality of the medium always
divulges a "resistance" to the
process of filmmaking. If anything, I
would say that Tscherkassys recent
work evokes a sense of film and photography
always going outside itself, as ex-trinsic.