INDEX #040: Attractions, Instructions and Other Romances

Este DVD compila ocho cortometrajes de Peter Tscherkassky, incluídos los multipremiados Instructions for a Light y Sound Machine.

Incluye:

Parallel Space: Inter-view - (1992, 18 min)

Parallel Space: Inter-View is made with a photo camera. A miniature photo is exactly the size of two film frames. Optically it resembles a flickering double exposure; the former temporal and spatial unity disintegrates into pieces which have a correspondence with each other. (Peter Tscherkassky) Photographic processes - the material transformations involved in recording, developing, printing and projecting - functions as metaphors for psychological processes.

Erotique - (1982, 1 min 40 sec)

One can determine a line in Tscherkassky's oeuvre which turns around a game with filmic presentation, with degrees of recognizability - 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. Often it is difficult to tell which part of the body one actually sees (whoever wants to can see/imagine/think sexual organs and sexual acts.) The gaze gets hung up on partial objects, no integral, whole body to think about. No body, whose representation was always one of the problems in cinema.

Happy-End - (1996, 11 min)

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. We see the pair pouring drinks, cutting cakes, making toast. Finally the exuberant movement of the dancing woman freezes. It is a deeply ambiguous moment that, from the expression on her face, allows one to think of something close to despair. On something like a modern, alienated, baroque vanity motive, which is still present in the Austrian tradition, and whose abrasion with the sensual certainty of the moment of drinking an egg liqueur gives Happy End a wider meaning.

Shot - Countershot - (1987, 22 sec)

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.... (Marli Feldvoss) Shot-countershot - the idea of the century.

Nachtstück (Nocturne) - (2006, 1 min)

We glide into "Eine kleine Nachtmusik," soon to abandon standardized paths of conventional representational film and encounter a few seconds of passionate sensorial film - an example of what may be called "physical cinema." The thesis: Master Mozart would have enjoyed it.

Coming Attractions - (2010, 25 min)

A film woven around the idea that between early cinema and avant-garde film exists a connection.

Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine - (2005, 17 min)

An attempt to transform a Roman Western into a Greek tragedy.

Ballett 16 - (1984, 4 min)

In this film Tscherkassky's interest was in the individual frame as constituting the core of filmic creation found early expression in several works based on satiric images or photographic frame enlargements, including Liebesfilm (1982), Sechs uber Eins (1982) and Motion Picture (1984). In the case of Ballett 16, 256 frame enlargments of a continuous dance movemnt 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.