Special on Peter Tscherkassky: Controlled Chaos: The Cinematic Unconscious of Peter Tscherkassky, by Matthew Levine
On the surface, the films of Peter Tscherkassky seem to align with the guiding principle of most experimental cinema (especially that which employs found footage). In Tscherkassky’s words, that guiding principle is “to diminish the distance between the viewer and what is being viewed, to create a cinema that can be experienced as a physical experience, and to provoke a kind of active seeing”. While this broad description might be applied to a wide range of avant-garde modes, from the Dadaist films of the silent era to the most recent mixed-media installations, it underscores a formalist approach that seeks to strip the cinematic process of its homogenizing forces (narrative, character, representation) until all that’s left is the bare, beating heart of the moving image.
This is the realm of the abstract, or so it seems: a world where legibility and meaning matter less than sensorial impact and theoretical subtext. Indeed, while Tscherkassky’s approach undergoes significant changes throughout his career, what remains consistent is the foregrounding of the cinematic apparatus and the raw materials with which it works its illusionist magic. From the crude, punkish energy of Aderlaß (1981) to the libidinous dreamscape of The Exquisite Corpus (2015), there’s no escaping the immediacy of cinema as a tactile and sensuous object.
The Trace of a Walk That Has Taken Place – a Conversation with Peter Tscherkassky, by Alejandro Bachmann
Aroma for the Eye, by Virgil Widrich
Lost Material and Found Footage: Peter Tscherkassky’s Dark Room—and Ours, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Essays:
A Sudden Passion 2: The Dockworker’s Dream by Bill Morrison, by Scott MacDonald
Remixology: An Axiology for the 21st Century and Beyond, by David J. Gunkel
Remixing Found Footage in the Age of Mass-Oriented Networks, by Oli Sorenson
Lost Objects: A Personal Journey Through Found Footage, by Yann Beauvais
Czechoslovakia 1968: Smuggled Footage, Cinematic Excess and the Politics of Cold War Propaganda, by Gracia Ramírez
Articles & Interviews:
The Rule and the Exception, by Mike Hoolboom
For It to Be Found It Need Not Have Been Lost in the First Place: Thoughts and Notes on the Form, by Julie Murray
Found Footage: Some Thoughts, by Malcolm Le Grice
A Hummingbird in Reverse: On Richard Kerr’s Morning…Came a Day Early, by Stephen Broomer
Book Reviews:
Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema (Thomas Elsaesser, 2016), by Eszter Polonyi
Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema (Michael Pigott, 2013), by César Ustarroz
Exploding Visions,An Interview with Winston Hacking, by Clint Enns
Artworks by:
Félix Dufour-Laperrière & Dominic Etienne Simard, Michael Fleming, Cécile Fontaine, Michael Higgins, Josh Lewis, Pablo Marín, Sam Spreckley and Peter Tscherkassky.
