OFFoff has the great honor and privilege to welcome the Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky together with his partner and colleague Eve Heller. Tscherkassky is a master of the found footage genre, one of the most significant avant-garde artists and vanguard cinema thinkers of the last decades.
“18 years after Kurt Kren produced his third film 3/60 Trees in Autumn, he shot his masterpiece 37/78 Tree Again. 18 years after I created my third darkroom film L’Arrivée (a homage to the Lumière brothers and their 1895 L’Arrivée d’un train), I embarked on Train Again – a homage to Kurt Kren that simultaneously taps into a classic motif in film history. My darkroom ride took a few years, but we finally arrived: All aboard!”
— Peter Tscherkassky
OFFoff took the opportunity to build a program around these four films. Key to any presentation of the work of “the father of European avant-garde film” Kurt Kren (1929−1998) and his relation to nature is 31/75 Asyl (Kren always began his titles with their corpus number and year of production, and made it all the way to 50/96). Tscherkassky’s most famous work, Outer Space, also intensely deals with notions of inner and outer space, albeit with a different aesthetic approach. Together with L’Arrivée, this is one of the two 35mm films that will be shown in CinemaScope format!
The arrival of a new Tscherkassky film once every half-decade counts as a genuine cinematic event: his working method involves painstakingly hand printing found footage material in the darkroom where he manually alters every single frame. Similarly interested in investigating the origins and materiality of the medium, Eve Heller’s body of work largely takes the form of quieter, often lyrical, material experiments that utilise both found and self-shot footage to draw out latent meaning in her subjects. Her new film, Singing in Oblivion, interweaves footage shot on location at Vienna’s Jewish Währinger cemetery with images painstakingly lifted from antique glass negatives acquired at a flea market and printed one frame at a time in a darkroom onto 35mm film strips. At the end of the evening, we wave you goodbye with one of Tscherkassky’s and Kren’s very brief “one-joke movies” that turn out to be more than a joke.
Eve Heller will present her new film. Peter Tscherkassky wil talk about his own work in relation to that of Kurt Kren.
“Kurt Kren was a pioneer: an avant-gardist in the classic and best sense of the word. A filmmaker who knows how to think in images like few others in this trade, and who realized these images in films that are among the most beautiful and most important in cinematic history.” — Peter Tscherkassky
We’re very grateful for the expertly co-curation of this program by Alexander Horwath & Regina Schlagnitweit. Horwath is the former director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum and co-editor of the museum’s 2007 publication on the work of Tscherkassky.
