PETER TSCHERKASSKY. FROM SUPER-8 TO SCOPE.
Sunday 1 June 2003, at 8pm
London Film School

TABULA RASA
Peter Tscherkassky, 1987/89, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
A mediated disruption of voyeuristic desire.
“The target of tabula rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the precondition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz (based on the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan) has established in theory is rendered as film in tabula rasa. At the beginning we can recognise only shadows from which the picture of a woman undressing herself hesitantly emerges. But exactly at the point when one believes one can make out what it is, the camera itself is located between our gaze and the object. The body of the woman keeps moving back and forth between revealing (as a picture) and covering, swinging from figurative to the abstract. tabula rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our view.” —Gabriele Jutz

PARALLEL SPACE: INTER-VIEW
Peter Tscherkassky, 1992, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
The ‘physics of seeing’ and the ‘physics of memory’ in a flickering condensation of space and time.
“Parallel Space: Inter-View is made with a photo camera. A miniature photo 24 x 36mm is exactly the size of two film frames. Originally, I had a strict, formal concept. The visual space of the Renaissance locked in the optics of the film and still camera. In front of our eyes the landscapes of the film spread out and allow themselves be conquered; a constellation which is then subverted by letting the hardware and the software slip minimally. If I take a photograph with a strict central perspective (the vanishing point in the middle), it gets smashed when projected. The spatial lines plunge towards the lower edge of one frame, to be ripped apart at the top of the next. Optically it resembles a flickering double exposure; the former temporal and spatial unity disintegrates into pieces that have a correspondence with each other. Soon these spatial constructions were not enough. I began to interpret the content of both spatial halves – to lead the spectator’s separation from the surrounding reality into another sequence of binary opposites: listener-speaker; viewer-viewed; public-private; man-woman; sensuality (emotion)-reason; sexuality-taboo, and so on. In addition, I took the psychoanalytic setting and drew a comparison with the cinema setting. In both cases there is a narrator who does not see or know his listener. Filmmakers, in common with the analysists, produce a very intimate flow of pictures which are met with highly concentrated attention but still fall into the anonymity of the audience…” —Peter Tscherkassky

L’ARRIVÉE
Peter Tscherkassky, 1998, 35mm CinemaScope, b/w, sound, 2 min
“L’Arrivée is my second homage to the Lumière Brothers. First you see the arrival of the film itself, which shows the arrival of a train at a station. But that train collides with a second train, causing a violent crash, which leads to an unexpected third arrival: the arrival of a beautiful woman – the happy ending. Reduced to two minutes L’Arrivée gives a brief but exact summary of what cinematography (after its arrival with the Lumière train) has made into an enduring presence of our visual environment: violence, emotions. Or, as an anonymous American housewife (cited by T.W. Adorno) used to describe Hollywood’s version of life: “Getting into trouble and out of it again.” —Peter Tscherkassky

OUTER SPACE
Peter Tscherkassky, 1999, 35mm CinemaScope, b/w, sound, 10 min
“Outer Space begins over the sound of a film projector. The image – luminously grainy, scratched black and white – is canted, off-centre, as though projected onto a wall from a worn-out print. A woman approached a house, hesitates, and reaches for the doorknob. As she walks through rooms, the visuals gradually degrade – the frame films with multiple exposures, and at times the images look as though they’ve been selectively exposed, certain areas of the frame burned with light, others obscured. With an electrical buzzing, the physical space surrounding the woman starts to break up: windows and mirrors shatter, images bleed into each other and disintegrate, until finally all that remains legible are sprocket holes and the optical track: the celluloid itself.” —Alice Lovejoy, 2002

DREAM WORK
Peter Tscherkassky, 2001, 35mm CinemaScope, b/w, sound, 12 min
“The images, the afterimages, the negatives circle each other in a maelstrom in which the classic psychoanalytic view of the conscious mind’s unconscious function is gradually lost in a higher logic of neuronal chaos. And then, guided by Man Ray’s rayograph technique, they reassemble in a para-dream which – paraphrasing Freud – could be described as a pictorial mental image. In the same way as in an actual dream, Dream Work does not contain individual and unconnected images; although each one is radically arbitrary, the context is so compelling that an alternative is inconceivable – unless taken from a different universe, of course. But this is the best of all possible worlds, regardless of how terrifying it seems.” —Bert Rebhandl

HAPPY END
Peter Tscherkassky, 1996, 35mm, colour, sound, 11 min
Reworking home movies from decades passed, revealing a celebration of private ritual, tradition and joy.
“Happy-End is a found footage film: the re-working of someone else’s home movies from the 60s and 70s. The sequences selected are taken from many hours of the staged private life of ‘Rudolf” and ‘Elfriede’, pivoting on demonstrative celebrations, alcohol and cake consumption together. Who watched these two before Peter Tscherkassky’s (and then our) gaze fell on their gaiety? Who stood behind the camera? I think that the theory that they themselves are responsible (in expectancy of their own spectatorship – look, it was so wonderful there) misses the mark. Neither is it a hidden camera, since Rudolf and Elfriede turn to it laughing, gesticulating and with glass in hand. It must be their child, a child who never enters the picture himself, except in the form of a symbolic doll and recurring mirrors which evidence his doings. I think that Rudolf and Elfriede fell in love in the summer of 1952 as Annie Cordy’s hit could be heard from every speaker – “Bonbons, Caramels, Esquimaux, Chocolats”. In 1958 their son was born, shortly after a first movie camera was bought. At the beginning of the 70s the son took over the direction of the annual celebration films. He also captured on film the sexual joy that hovers lightly between the sparkling wine and the Sachertorte. Twenty years later the child, by now a grown man, sees these rediscovered films again.” —Alexander Horwath

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