Outer space

"Outer space" is a movie directed in 1999 by the Austrian avant-garde  filmmaker Peter Otto Emile Tscherkassky.



 

Peter Tscherkassky appartient avec Martin Arnold, Gustav Deutsch et Dietmar Brehm à cette génération de cinéastes expérimentaux autrichiens qui a succédé à celle de Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren, Ernst Schmidt Jr. et Valie Export. Actif depuis une vingtaine d’années déjà dans le domaine de la recherche (post)structurelle pure et dure, il a dernièrement retenu l’attention par quelques films exceptionnels dont cette petite merveille, "Outer Space" (1999), réalisée en cinémascope et selon une technique de montage très originale, reformulant par les moyens propres à l’expérimental l’argument d’un film fantastique des années 80.
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The austrian avant-garde film-maker used incredible editing techniques to create a kind of epileptic stream with footage from the horror movie "The entity"

"...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..."
Rhys Graham (australian filmmaker & writer) - 2001

 

 

 

as well you can look at other of his movies as
the amazing "Instructions for a light & sound machine"  (2005)

This "Instructions for a light & sound machine" 17' long movie, with a soundtrack by the composer Dirk Schaefer, sees Tscherkassky gleaning footage from Sergio Leone’s genre classic "The good, the Bad and the Ugly" , bending and augmenting it into his own revisionist Western – a Greek tragedy in which the hero meets the conditions of his own possibility. 

 

& "Manufraktur" (1985) 

 

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