Special Effects in Martin Arnold's and Peter Tscherkassky's Cinema of Mind

With its dedication to Man Ray and luminous rayographs, Peter Tscherkassky's Dream Work (2001) makes its debt to Surrealist film explicit. Both Dream Work and an earlier film, Outer Space (1999), rework footage taken from the 1981 Sidney Furie film, The Entity, in which Barbara Hershey plays a woman who is terrorized by an unknown and invisible entity. Of the two, Outer Space is the better-known film, having been shown at more than forty international film festivals and released on both VHS and DVD. The video tape of these films distributed by Re:Voir, has been packaged with a booklet containing essays on the films and an interview with Tscherkassky by Nicole Brenez. Commenting on Outer Space's extraordinary international success, Brenez tells Tscherkassky: "I have seen many cinephiles of American film become wholly receptive to avant-garde cinema when they discovered Outer Space. Your work not only achieves a new level of cinematic form, a feat that has generated enthusiasm among critics and film scholars, but it also has wide popular appeal."¹

When the film has shown at international film festivals it has often occupied the position of showstopper: after the screening of a half-dozen or so films, the curtain draws back to make way for Cinemascope. ² The sheer size of the projected image engulfs everything that has gone before it. Printed in black and white, rather than the color of the original, the film has a brilliant, graphical beauty. It also looks, and sounds, like nothing else: aggressive, violent, awhirl with a crackling, disturbing energy. The source material for Outer Space is itself a violent, disturbing film, which attempts to assuage any disquiet that spectators might experience in relation to their voyeuristic enjoyment of the films' rape scenes—scenes in which special effects make the effects of rape visible on Hershey's naked body—by giving them a protagonist who fights back. The fact that Outer Space exhibits no interest in brokering the same obscene contract in no way offers spectators relief.

Fig 1.

Peter Tscherkassky's Dream Work (copyright sixpackfilms).

Tscherkassky has described his idea for Outer Space as being to "make a film in which the filmic material would permeate the marginal plot."³ It is Doris Petern identifying the stakes of this film's own contract with spectators when she suggests that, in Outer Space, "the materiality of the film is affirmed as a space for aggression."⁴ If The Entity is an exploitative film, Outer Space attributes the source of this exploitation, not to the singularly exploitive nature of this film, but to a cinema so monstrously compelling in its scope, luminosity, and aural and visual effects, that it can never entirely be resisted. Outer Space turns all the aggression that the cinema is capable of against its source material, but not without having to acknowledge this aggression as its own. All the monstrosity of the source material is still there in Dream Work. It's just that in this film, the transformation of that material—the artisanal reworking of it into complex superimpositions interleaved with footage of the filmmaker's hands working on the film's rayographs—also hint at another story (Fig. 1). Like Outer Space, Dream Work fulfills an avant-garde desire to interrogate the cinema's occult power, to make visible and audible, what might otherwise be left latent or repressed. Out of this process, something else is produced, something newly articulate and utterly arousing.

Along with pièce touchée (1989) and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998)—two found-footage films made by fellow Austrian, Martin Arnold—this essay situates Tscherkassky's Outer Space and Dream Work within a long history of avant-garde filmmaking concerned with exploring cinema's capacity for representing the conscious and unconscious activities of mind. Where this study differs from the small, but significant body of criticism that exists on these filmmakers' work, is not simply in bringing their work together in this way, but in making their films...