Peter Tscherkassky

A premonition of a horror film, lurking danger: A house - at night, slightly tilted in the camera's view, eerily lit - surfaces from the pitch black, then sinks back into it again. A young woman begins to move slowly towards the building... (imdb)

An attempt to transform a Roman Western into a Greek tragedy. (imdb)

A woman goes to bed, falls asleep, and begins to dream. This dream takes her to a landscape of light and shadow, evoked in a form only possible through classic cinematography. An homage to Man Ray, dedicated to the beginning of the European avant-garde film within the surrealist movement.

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

L'Arrivée is Tscherkassky's second hommage to the Lumiére-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 us to an unexpected third arrival, the arrival of a beautiful woman - the happy-end. (tscherkassky.at)

Found footage from a feature film. From an idyllic scene at the sea Tscherkassky moves to a speedy car driving by night. The radical movement of objects, bodies and senses illustrates the power of cinema. --Viennale (Viennale)

In the darkroom, 50 unexposed film strips were laid across a surface, upon which a frame of La sortie des ouvriers de l'usine Lumière was projected. The stringing together of the individual developed sections make up the new film, which reads the original frame like a page from a musical score: within the strips from top to bottom and sequentially from left to right. --INDEX (index-dvd.at)

A found footage film about oral rituals, about festive occasions and about a married couple who understood how to enrich and enliven their cosy togetherness... (imdb)

Peter Tscherkassky's Coming Attractions is a sly, sartorial comedy that masterfully mines the relationship between early cinema and the avant-garde by way of fifties-era advertising. With references to Méliès, Lumières, Cocteau, Léger, Chomette and Persil laundry detergent, the film explores cinema's subliminal possibilities using an impressive arsenal of techniques, like solarization, optical printing and multiple exposures. (MUBI)

On a weekend in June 1983, in what was deemed a "country outing," an impressive number of artists from Berlin went to a small village in Schleswig-Holstein; their intention was to give the local residents a taste of Berlin's avant-garde art. This event included presentations of dance, music, performance art, painting, land art and film. Back in Berlin the footage was manipulated in several ways to produce an "experimental examination." (filmvideo.at)

256 frame enlargements of a continuous dance movement were dissected into 16 segments, each consisting of 16 frames. These segments were rearranged and rephotographed frame-by-frame. The resulting synthetic composition of movement was rephotographed off a screen running at twice its normal speed in order to accelerate the final film. (dafilms.com)

One can determine a line in Tscherkassky's oeuvre which turns around a game with filmic presentation, with degrees of recognisability - with the only-just and the not-any-more. Just to see desire. An example of this is Erotique. One sees swirling pictures, parts of a woman's face, red lips, eyes in cyclical fragments of movement. (dafilms.com)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, according to his biographers (and his letters confirm this fact), was an extremely sensuous person, and Nachtstueck (Nocturne) was intended to refer to this aspect of his personality: We glide into "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" a bit, then abandon standardized paths of conventional representational film and encounter a few seconds of passionate sensory filmæan example of something I would like to call "physical cinema." The thesis: Herr Mozart would have enjoyed it. (dafilms.com)

Not a stage direction, but rather something very concrete is hidden behind the technical term. Something which betrays a little of the yearning for intelligent and playful dealings with the medium of short film. (dafilms.com)

Parallel Space: Inter-View was entirely shot with an analog photo camera. It is a film about the longing for intimacy, a film about the distance between the searching gaze and the world. (mubi.com)

The Exquisite Corpus is based on various erotic films and advertising rushes. (imdb)

18 years after Kurt Kren produced his third film, he shot his masterpiece 37/78: Tree Again (1978). 18 years after I created my third darkroom film, I embarked on Train Again. This film is an homage to Kurt Kren that simultaneously taps into a classic motif in film history. My darkroom ride took a few years, but we finally arrived: All aboard. (imdb)

Liebesfilm is an ironic attack on one of the durables of the Hollywood clichés - the film kiss. A short take of mouths approaching each other is shown 522 times. But the kiss never takes place, merely the speed of the movement is continually increased. This excessive repetition of the theme destroys the "happy clarity" that inhabits "the film kiss" myth. (imdb)

The target of Tabula Rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the pre-condition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan have established in theory is rendered as film in Tabula Rasa. Tabula Rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, in so far literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our gaze. (Sixpack Film)