Outer Space
Peter Tscherkassky
9:58 minutes, black and white, sound, 35mm CinemaScope
Austria 1999
Outer Space is – together with L'Arrivée (1997/1998) and Dreamwork (2001) – part of Tscherkassky’s “CinemaScope Trilogy,” which draws on fragments of Hollywood films. It utilizes footage from The Entity (S. J. Furie, 1981), a psychological horror film, in which the female protagonist is pursued by an invisible ghost. In Outer Space it is no longer an unknown entity against which the woman must struggle, but that portion of the filmstrip that is normally unseen when film is projected – the “outer space” of the film’s image, consisting of the optical soundtrack and its perforations.
Outer Space is a camera-less film, entirely created in the darkroom by means of an archaic contact copying process. Tscherkassky explains the method: “I place a strip of unexposed 35 mm film on a piece of cardboard that measures 15 by 100 centimeters. The filmstrip itself equals 48 frames in length, which comes to two seconds of projection time. The raw stock I use is orthochromatic – since it is desensitized to red light, I can work in a darkroom dimly lit by a red bulb. The unexposed film is held in place by small nails with which the cardboard is outfitted. I place one meter of found footage on top of my unexposed film stock. The nails of the cardboard protrude through every fourth perforation hole, so I can keep track of the frame lines: 35 mm film has four perforation holes per film frame, each pair of nails holds one frame in place. Subsequently I copy the found footage onto the raw material by exposing it to light. After copying details from 48 frames of found footage, I repeat the process several times over again, exposing the same single strip of raw stock to several different strips of found footage. In this way, I can mix details from entirely disparate sequences and each individual frame becomes an intricate optical collage. Parts of Outer Space include up to five multiple exposures” (Tscherkassky 2012).
Peter Tscherkassky, born 1958 in Vienna, lives and works in Vienna and Enzersfeld, Austria.
More images
References
Maureen Turim, “Tscherkassky: Works of Dreams and Shadows,” in Film Unframed. A History of Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema, ed. Peter Tscherkassky (Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2012), pp. 206–221.
Tom Gunning, “Peter Tscherkassky manufractura dos minutos de cine im(puro)/Peter Tscherkassky Manufractures Two Minutes of (Im)Pure Cinema” [Spanish/English], both in Desde el cuarto oscuro. El cine manufracturado de Peter Tscherkassky/From a Dark Room. The Manufractured Cinema of Peter Tscherkassky [Spanish/English], eds. Maximiliano Cruz and Sandra Gómez (Mexico City: Interior 13/UNAM International Film Festival – FICUNAM, 2012), pp. 61–79 and pp. 130–139.
