Thursday, January 30, 2014

Dream Work: A Film by Peter Tscherkassky


Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky works with found footage to create layered films that disturb our casual acceptance of those seemingly everyday tasks performed in cinematic stories. The simple act of walking into a room and drawing the shades can become a hallucinatory experience containing dread. The few films of his that I have seen create suspense from the ordinary. Sounds are repeated and magnified. Shots jitter and jump, repeating in a staccato nervousness that suggests confusion, hysteria, horror.

Dream Work makes the connection between filmmaking and the unconscious obvious. It explodes scenes from a Hollywood movie to reveal the hidden dream forces contained by cinema itself. The rush of fluidly changing points of view reaches a crescendo and breaks down into sprocketed film strips and hands editing celluloid to make palpable the dream content of all films. Working with the material of dreams is what Tscherkassky seems to be doing.

Visit the filmmaker's web site.