Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 161: Sun Oct 24

The films of Peter Tscherkassky (1999-2021): Cafe Oto, Dalston, 7.30pm

Celebrating the release of “Dirk Schaefer : Peter Tscherkassky, All the Soundtracks (2005–2021)” by purge.xxx, Sonic Cinema presents Peter Tscherkassky & Dirk Schaefer’s four collaborations to date: Train Again (2021); The Exquisite Corpus (2015); Coming Attractions (2010); Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005); as well as Tscherkassky’s classic of avant-garde cinema Outer Space (1999). All films will be projected in their original 35mm format. Tscherkassky’s composer and sound designer Schaefer will be involved in a discussion with Stanley Schtinter (purge.xxx).

The films of Peter Tscherkassky have played a central role in the international reawakening of interest in avant-garde film. At the turn from a photographic to a digital culture of moving images, his work follows in the footsteps of Austrian masters Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, and Ernst Schmidt Jr. to create a thrilling filmic language that engages psychoanalysis and semiotics whilst exploring the physicality of the medium and its potential to overwhelm both visually and sonically. Tscherkassky’s working method – painstakingly hand printing found-footage material frame-by-frame in the darkroom – gives his films a deeply materialist sensibility, yet through the flickering fragments they also maintain cinema’s ability to shock and thrill. Dirk Schaefer’s sound design, which is intrinsically coupled to Tscherkassky’s images, constantly surprises with its chopped speech, repetitive musical refrains, arrhythmic noises, progressive buzzing and deep silences. The evening has been programmed by Oliver Dickens.

Here (and above is one of the shorts, Outer Space.

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