Breaking the Image

Get Ready

Director: Peter Tscherkassky
Austria, 1999, 2', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

This short film, a reworking of found footage, doesn't even need sixty seconds to demonstrate that cinema can be both an instrument of idleness and a vehicle for madness. Every image produced by Tscherkassky is infused with a high level of adrenaline.

L'Arrivée

Director: Peter Tscherkassky
Austria, 1997, 3', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

L’Arrivée is an avant-garde exploration of the cinematic process. Beginning with the initial purity of the screen and light, a playful interaction with visual and auditory distortions emerges. Tscherkassky manipulates footage from Terence Young's film Mayerling (1968), stripping away color and transforming the CinemaScope image into a chaotic, hysterical sequence of collisions. The images blur together, positives turn negative, and filmic traces become intertwined with the unfolding events. L’Arrivée stands as a deconstructivist tribute to the film medium and its ever-changing realities.

Outer Space

Director: Peter Tscherkassky
Austria, 1999, 10', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

Outer Space explores the premonitions of a horror film: a young woman enters a distorted house at night, accompanied by fragmented sounds and muffled music. Using footage from a Hollywood film, Tscherkassky re-edits the material, presenting Barbara Hershey in a dramatically reimagined, frame-by-frame interpretation. By merging images and spaces, he transforms the familiar into a nightmarish alienation. Figures intrude from beyond the frame, and the montage spirals into chaos. Outer Space pushes the boundaries of the filmic image, penetrating the projection to the point of delirium. It is an avant-garde cinematic shock, a hellscape of glitches, yet possesses an unimaginable beauty.

Dream Work

Director: Peter Tscherkassky
Austria, 2001, 11', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

Dream Work is a black-and-white CinemaScope film set in a deep phase of sleep. A woman enters a house and sensually undresses—she serves as both the object and subject of the film. As she falls asleep, she becomes deeply entwined with the film, and the film, in turn, penetrates her. Tscherkassky's frame-by-frame replication creates a phallic overlay where the body and film become inseparably fused. Beneath the surface of awakening, the dream persists; doors open to an inner self, and nothingness looms behind the man in the room. Images and their traces spin into a chaotic vortex, surpassing psychoanalytic interpretations and evolving into an artistic dreamscape.

Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine

Director: Peter Tscherkassky
Austria, 2005, 17', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

The film features a clearly identifiable protagonist. While unknowingly walking down a street, this protagonist suddenly becomes subject to the cruel whims of both the audience and the director. Despite heroically resisting, they are condemned to death and undergo a cinematic demise marked by a film break. The protagonist then descends into Hades, the realm of shadowy beings. In this underworld of cinematography, they encounter the very instructions that enable the existence of all filmic shadows. In other words, the protagonist confronts the conditions of their existence as a cinematic shadow entity.

Train Again

Director: Peter Tscherkassky
Austria, 2021, 20', DCP, b&w
No dialogue

Train Again accelerates 19th-century perception and propels perspective into motion through the dual forces of railways and cinema. The film draws inspiration from the avant-garde of cinema, invoking both heaven and hell, and veers toward the apocalyptic. This darkroom action experiment, an underground blockbuster in thousands of shades of gray, embodies a cinema of madness that is both concrete and abstract. The film serves as a rapturous homage to the fragility and explosive power of cinema, even as its aggression escalates to its ultimate intensity.

The screenings will be held with the director in attendance.