Dark Rooms and Dreamscapes
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Dark Rooms and Dreamscapes

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Peter Tscherkassky is the DJ Shadow of the film industry. Worshipping analogue, the avant-garde film legend collects scraps of black-and-white footage from old-school film reels -film ends and all – and knits them together in his darkroom in astonishing ways. “My main artistic concern is to make films which could only be made with analogue cinema, which is handmade and not with a computer,” he says. “I do not have the legal rights but I’m beneath the level where Hollywood pays attention to me.”

Tscherkassky is venerated as one of the leading avant-garde filmmakers of today. His esoteric works are multilayered, visually poetic and psychologically testing. Being excited by film, not even Melbourne’s hovering ash clouds, creepy fogs or brisk, cold snaps could keep the Viennese filmmaker from attending his debut screenings at this year’s MIFF. “I have to pack some pullovers and leather jackets and I’ll be right,” Tscherkassky says over the phone. He has been lapping up the warmth of his UK summer before bracing himself for Melbourne’s neurotic weather patterns. “My films have been regularly been showed in Melbourne but this is the first time I’ll be going there,” he says. Tscherkassky is defiant about the creative process involved in creating his film collages.

“You can make films like a painter or films like a writer,” he explains. He assumes the former role as he literally paints over the film he collects with a laser pointer. Each frame is ‘painted’ over several times, a laborious process that takes one hour to complete two seconds of footage. Tscherkassky’s research process is just as time-consuming. “I use found footage mainly from Hollywood films. I watched those films over and over again on VHS and DVDs so often and learn them by heart. After the five or six times you don’t see the story; you see the images, which are a complete new story that you never would have seen before.” The final product is disturbingly stunning and eerie.

His most critically acclaimed and multi-award winning piece, Outer Space, creates tension through flickering lights, scratched footage and soft, static sounds humming throughout the entire nine minutes. In 2000, Outer Space became the first film of its kind to be screened at Sundance Film Festival, along with showing at Cannes. The plot follows a young heroine through her terrifying experiences in her seemingly dull 1980s suburban home. The B-grade footage is scratched and gritty but oozes with sophistication in the way Tscherkassky ties each frame together with visually stunning effects. To put it clearly, Outer Space makes Roman Polanski’s Repulsion seem like an ideal picnic. The audience can either sit back and enjoy the unique, cinematic experience or take the time to ponder over the strange themes entrenched in surrealism and film theory.

“What I try to create is a kind of physical cinema,” says Tscherkassky. “I’m trying to present cinema in a way that you can just experience cinema scope. And it has this kind of flickering effect. You can just enjoy the experience…The surface is fun.”

Turning his nose up at film snobbery, Tscherkassky welcomes people from all walks of life to observe his pieces and take what they please from the experience. “The best preparation would be to get rid of any kind of shyness and ask questions. The best way is to not be a specialist in film,” he says. “When it comes to the darkroom films, there’s not much you should do before…You can sit there for two seconds or one hour and think a lot. [But] on a very basic level, you could just come into the cinema and watch it and enjoy it. It’s a very intense experience.”

For the more curious film buffs, Tscherkassky will be running a master class lecture at ACMI that will deconstruct his peculiar ‘handmade’ filmmaking process. “Most of the people stay inside the cinema after my films. They get interested and want to know more and wait for my commentaries,” he says. As part of the Dark Rooms and Dreamscapes event, internationally recognised film artist Eva Heller will also showcase her magical cinematic approach to the everyday.