The Arrival

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A found footage film about rituals, festive occasions and a married couple in a seeming frenzy of cosy togetherness. We see the pair pouring drinks, cutting cakes, making toast. Finally the exuberant movement of the dancing woman freezes.

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.

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.

An attempt to transform a Roman Western into a Greek tragedy. The hero of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is easy to identify. Walking down the street unknowingly, he suddenly realizes that he is not only subject to the gruesome moods of several spectators but also at the mercy of the filmmaker.

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.

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…

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.

On a weekend in June 1983, in what was deemed a "country outing,“ an impressive number of artists from Berlin went to a small village in Schleswig-Holstein; their intention was to give the local residents a taste of Berlin’s avant-garde art. This event included presentations of dance, music, performance art, painting, land art and film. Back in Berlin the footage was manipulated in several ways to produce an “experimental examination.” —independent film and video database

The target of Tabula Rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the pre-condition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan have established in theory is rendered as film in Tabula Rasa. At the beginning we can recognize only shadows from which the picture of a woman undressing herself hesitantly emerges. But exactly at the point when one believes one can make out what it is, the camera is located in front of the object. Tabula Rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, in so far literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our gaze.

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.