Peter Tscherkassky

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

Aderlaß is a youthful attempt to process the inheritance of the Vienna Actionists through the use of a super 8 camera. In front of the camera is a performance from Armin Schmickl Sebastiano (Peter Tcherkassky). A game with light and sound that explodes out of the calm into a delirium of movement and finally returns, after the "blood-letting", to rigidity. (Irene Judmayer)

Krung Thep is a dualistic journey between darkness and the dawn of a new day. The short film symbolizes the beginning of the conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia in 2025, a border dispute that displaced thousands of families and resulted in over a hundred deaths.

Liebesfilm is an ironic attack on one of the durables of the Hollywood clichés - the film kiss. A short take of mouths approaching each other is shown 522 times. But the kiss never takes place, merely the speed of the movement is continually increased. This excessive repetition of the theme destroys the "happy clarity" that inhabits "the film kiss" myth.

Since 1995, the Viennale has invited renowned directors to create short, one-minute films as personal contributions to the festival. Ranging from home movies to political essays, musical sketches to abstract studies, these “little films” form a unique anthology of cinematic moments. 20 Little Films collects a selection of these works, premiering together for the Viennale’s 50th anniversary at the Locarno Film Festival.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, according to his biographers (and his letters confirm this fact), was an extremely sensuous person, and Nachtstück (Nocturne) was intended to refer to this aspect of his personality: We glide into "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" a bit, then abandon standardized paths of conventional representational film and encounter a few seconds of passionate sensory filmæan example of something I would like to call "physical cinema." The thesis: Herr Mozart would have enjoyed it.

On the 28th of October 1884 Daniel Paul Schreber, candidate of the National Liberal Party in Chemnitz, suffered a heavy defeat at the elections of the German Reichstag. He was taken up in the mental clinic of the Leipzig University soon afterwards. To his rehabilition he wrote an extensive piece of work, "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken" (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), which was published in 1903 and led to his temporary dismissal. Hereby Schreber became the most quoted psychiatric patient in scientific literature. The third part was realized by Peter Tscherkassy based on a concept by Ernst Schmidt Jr.

A collection of short experimental horror films, some well-known, some not.

A young woman move towards a house that holds a potentially dangerous spirit that has been tormenting her. The woman tries to fight against the film itself as it starts to cause the world to collapse.

(for Ernst Schmidt jrs. trilogy Memories of a Nervous Illness, part 1 & part 2) 1987/88, 16mm (S 8 blow up), á 4 min, colour & b/w

A propulsively jittering journey through the cinematic imaginary using glitchy found footage and jacked-up cyber sounds, Get Ready hits the highway hard and takes us with it.

A woman goes to bed, falls asleep, and begins to dream. This dream takes her to a landscape of light and shadow, evoked in a form only possible through classic cinematography. An homage to Man Ray, dedicated to the beginning of the European avant-garde film within the surrealist movement.

Peter Tscherkassky condenses the long history of railways in the movies into a rousing blast for the senses in a heartfelt tribute to another legend of experimental cinema Kurt Kren.

On the 28th of October 1884 Daniel Paul Schreber, candidate of the National Liberal Party in Chemnitz, suffered a heavy defeat at the elections of the German Reichstag. He was taken up in the mental clinic of the Leipzig University soon afterwards. To his rehabilition he wrote an extensive piece of work, "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken" (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), which was published in 1903 and led to his temporary dismissal. Hereby Schreber became the most quoted psychiatric patient in scientific literature.

Alternating between recognizable and abstract picture worlds, between theoretical reflection and lush sensuality is the main distinguishing characteristic of Peter Tscherkassky's work. That is particularly true when he concerns himself with filmic space. In Kelimba moving plastic objects are inserted, one after another, in a completely flat picture space. At the same time the processes of movement are subjected to a repetitive rhythm and thus transformed into a dance.

The first of Peter Tscherkassky's Cinemascope trilogy of short films is a fragmented glimpse of images pulsating with chaotic rhythm as they fight white margins for room in his palette. Mirrored frames being split by white margin and trying to reassemble again like the poles of a magnet, a train approaching station and colliding with itself in white-hot blistering chaos.

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.

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…

The Exquisite Corpus is based on various erotic films and advertising rushes. Myriad fragments are melted into a single sensuous, humorous, gruesome, and ecstatic dream.

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

A woman on a meadow, strolling around, narcisstically involved, wandering. Now and again one can see her breasts through her half-opened shirt. The camera films with a powerful telephoto lens. This idyll is radically destroyed when the woman suddenly looks directly into the camera. There is an immediate cut (the voyeur has been discovered) and the whole sequence of events begins from the beginning again, but each time re-filmed from the last till finally, only a completely abstract, flickering picture remains.

256 frame enlargements of a continuous dance movement 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.

One can determine a line in Tscherkassky’s oeuvre which turns around a game with filmic presentation, with degrees of recognisability — 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.

Twenty-eight well-known filmmakers living and working in Austria were invited by WIENER MOZARTJAHR 2006, to produce associative miniatures on Mozart. Requirement: they had to be one-minute artistic short films. The directors come from a whole range of different backgrounds, ranging from animated, experimental and short film to documentaries and feature films. The result is a multi-facetted sampler of diverse formal and contextual positions with regard to Mozart’s person and his influence on today’s society, art and culture. The contributions run the gamut from experimental-conceptual statements through socio-critical and documentary observations to pithy short feature films.