|
Space is the place Peter Tscherkassky charts outer reaches By Johnny Ray Hustonjohnny@sfbg.com I could construct an article about Peter Tscherkassky's use of found footage by editing together the words of others. I could call upon Guy Maddin's description of Outer Space, in which "the screen literally explodes with a tumult of [Barbara] Hershey faces." I could quote from Alexander Horwath, editor of a book about the filmmaker, and note that thanks to Tscherkassky's peerless optical printing, "the 'industrial' 35mm film becomes a body with visual and audio qualities which allows itself to be shaped and formed and expanded with a truly voluptuous desire." I could shout "Preach it!" to Rhys Graham as he declares that Tscherkassky "sculpts with time and space." I could go on borrowing, but random thought collage doesn't come close to the Tscherkassky effect, which these days completely transforms a single source. Tscherkassky has built at least two films — the comparatively sedate 2001 Freud-out (and Man Ray tribute) Dream Work, and his amazing 1999 masterpiece, Outer Space — from shots within Sydney J. Furie's 1981 The Entity, about a woman (Barbara Hershey) who is repeatedly attacked and raped by an invisible force. Furie's horror flick is a mean little piece of work, yet even in visceral terms it is no match for Outer Space. There, the violence contained within The Entity spills out of what one normally considers film space to become a living thing. (Graham is right to note that David Fincher has tried and failed to achieve similar effects.) A multiplying Hershey melts under the black-and-white heat of Outer Space's furious strobe light effects, as various temporal and physical realms dance and do battle within a single frame. Calm turns into calamity before returning to calm, only to explode again. For Furie, a shot of Hershey's face smashing up against a reflective surface is a Suspiria rip-off, but in Tscherkassky's Outer Space, windows and mirrors carry heavier connotations — at least until they're demolished. This is a filmmaker who has asserted that avant-garde theory and practice operate in complete opposition to André Bazin's famous realist concept of film as a window to the world. Yet (as Graham points out) Outer Space also shatters theorist Christian Metz's Lacanian notion of film as a mirror. If only to avoid hasty decisions, the jury might be out as to whether Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) can join Outer Space as a masterpiece, but it proves Tscherkassky will place both genders under the extreme conditions, or the ferocious "mercy" (his word) of his looking glass. Building upon Eli Wallach's scenes in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, it discovers a realm where iris effects float like balloons and a single gunshot sets off an astonishing ricochet attack. Sergio Leone's existential masculinity grows ever more mythic, if no longer so grandiose or proud. Other trailblazers may not have explored the same outer spaces, but it's possible to detect influences within Tscherkassky's films; Bruce Conner's Valse Triste (1977) is an older cousin of Dream Work. Drawing comparisons between Tscherkassky and fellow Austrian avant-gardists is a trickier matter. Tscherkassky is more lyrical than his relative contemporary Martin Arnold, the man behind 1998's Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy — a gut-buster that, through comedy rather than terror, challenges Outer Space for the title of the most convulsive movie I've ever seen. There are shades of the trailblazing Peter Kubelka in 1983's Freeze Frame (it takes fire to freeze a frame, a young Tscherkassky seems to demonstrate) and in 1996's Happy-End, which provides a fitting and funny conclusion to this program. In Happy-End, a bespectacled bald man and a stout woman in an ungainly wig down liquor, devour cakes, and hook elbows to dance in circles, all to the sound of an endlessly repeated and sped-up song about bonbons and caramels. The barrage of booze and sugary desserts alone is enough to give you a heaving hangover, but once Tscherkassky has put the decor's clashing shades of pink, green, and brown through his kaleidoscope, you'll be wondering if the resulting nightmare is worse than any that Hershey has run into on her celluloid highway. *
Tues/14, 7:30 p.m. Pacific Film Archive Theater 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4–$8 (510) 642-5249 www.bampfa.berkeley.edu www.tscherkassky.at
|
||||