Artist in Person

Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky's stunning films have been described as “a meeting point of cogent theoretical preoccupations and a kind of anarchic punk energy” (Rhys Graham, Senses of Cinema). Constructed out of recycled images from home movies, early cinema, and studio productions, and employing rephotography, contact printing, and blow-ups, they recontextualize and rethink the meanings of found footage while also foregrounding the materiality of film itself in unique and breathtaking ways. Most dramatically, in Outer Space (1999, 10 mins, B&W, 'Scope, 35mm), the image and soundtrack from a horror film tear and break apart, splintering the screen and assaulting the heroine and the fictional space itself. In his most recent film, the exhilarating Instructions for Light and Sound Machine (2005, 17 mins, B&W, 35mm), Tscherkassky puts the cowboy hero at (in his words) “the mercy of the filmmaker,” while in his homage to Man Ray, Dream Work (2001, 12 mins, B&W, 'Scope, 35mm), the filmmaker employs displacement and condensation to dream for us an intense, sensual, and vital cinema. Also screening: Freeze Frame (1983, 10 mins, B&W/Color, 16mm) and Happy End (1996, 12 mins, B&W, 35mm).