Through his ongoing exploration of language, of the act of watching, and of the relationship between cinema and the viewer, Peter Tscherkassky is one of the undisputed masters of avant-garde cinema, not only in Austria but also internationally. Winner of the Orizzonti Award for the Best Short Film at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.
In Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, once again the focus is on our beloved cinema. Peter Tscherkassky has shown us how great classics of film history can take on entirely different meanings each time, depending on who decides to manipulate them as they wish. At the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs.
The exquisite Corpus is an important essay on the process of filmmaking itself, demonstrating how important it is to treasure what has been made in the past and how essential it is to maintain a strong desire to experiment in order to allow art itself to evolve. At the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
The title is rather eloquent. Manufracture. Manufacture. Fracture. Film is observed and handled by Peter Tscherkassky in every possible way. An eternal movement gives life in turn to the movement of images, which, one after the other, make the cinematic spectacle possible.
The movie screen is totally white. On the sides you can clearly see the holes of the film. And suddenly, in L’Arrivée we find ourselves right in a station. A train, as in the Lumière film, is about to arrive. What will happen next?
Not only early cinema, but also advertising films and, of course, avant-garde cinema play the leading roles in Coming Attractions, as part of a series of “experiments” aimed at retracing all the most important stages in the history of the seventh art and paying homage to it in a reverent, but also funny and playful way. Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.
In Outer Space, Peter Tscherkassky has once again shown us how cinema itself can take on different connotations each time, how a film, through skilful editing, can become a completely new work, how easy it is to mould pre-existing images to one’s will. And so this work of his immediately reveals itself to be a highly controversial film, which almost desecrates the seventh art itself.
Peter Tscherkassky’s Train again is not simply a tribute to film history and to one of the most beloved and versatile means of transport, which has always had great significance in film. Train again is also – and above all – a tribute to the history of Austrian avant-garde cinema and to one of its most outstanding representatives. At the Viennale 2021.
If we think of Austrian animation cinema, particularly significant is artist Stefan Stratil’s statement “Austria is a nation of animation films without animation films”. In short: of all possible film genres, animation is the least explored in Austria today. At least apparently.