ICA Cinema, 4pm
+ Close-Up Cinema 8.30pm
ICA Cinema introduction:
The ICA in association with MUBI and LSFF present a screening of Austrian analogue filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky’s work, featuring the UK premiere of The Exquisite Corpus (2015).
Having premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year and after travelling through New York, Toronto or Melbourne, The Exquisite Corpus is a found footage work using various erotic films and advertising rushes. It plays on the “cadavre exquis” technique used by the Surrealists, drawing disparate body parts and constellating magical creatures. Myriad fragments are melted into a single sensuous, humorous, gruesome, and ecstatic dream.
The screening is followed by a Q&A with Peter Tscherkassky and director Peter Strickland.
Full programme:
L´Arrivee, 1998, 35mm, black & white, no sound, 2 min 09 sec
Outer Space, 1999, 35mm, black & white, sound, 9 min 58 sec
Dream Work, 2001, 35mm, black & white, sound, 11 min
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, 2005, 35mm, black & white, no sound, 17 min
The Exquisite Corpus, 2015, 35mm, black & white, no sound, 19 min
The film is also being shown at Close-Up Cinema tonight and here are the details of their programme.
Reverse Shot review:
Peter Tscherkassky’s The Exquisite Corpus, a 20-minute sensory spectacle was a true anomaly at Cannes, a blatantly experimental work whose aesthetic and thematic pleasures are inextricably linked to its author’s analog approach and sense of formal foreplay. Constructed from strips of vintage erotica and associated paraphernalia, the film centers its threadbare narrative around a literal nightmare of sexual indulgence. In the initial footage a nudist couple stumbles upon a naked and unconscious woman on the beach. Proceeding from this setup (which seems to nod to the aesthetics of silent cinema) is an eruption of heavily manipulated images, presumably memories or death-rattle hallucinations from the mind of the unresponsive girl, which Tscherkassky edits into a cascade of overlapping limbs and disassociated debaucheries. Superimpositions stack one atop the other, creating a kind of carnal conniption where divergent figures and detached narratives collapse into single frames that flicker and fragment in a display of accumulating sensation. I was reminded of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures on more than one occasion, and at its hallucinatory best, The Exquisite Corpus approaches a similar plane of enraptured physicality.
Jordan Cronk
Here (and above) is an extract
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