Outer Space

1999 · 10m · Austria

Directed by Peter Tscherkassky

Genres: experimental, horror

Tones: dark, surreal, tense

Using found footage from the 1981 horror film The Entity, Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky deconstructs and reassembles the imagery of Barbara Hershey through a handmade darkroom process, transforming a Hollywood horror into a visceral, camera-less exploration of cinema's material boundaries.

Picked by Margot

The scouts

Tscherkassky tortures Barbara Hershey's nightmare through a darkroom until the film itself starts screaming — sprockets, soundtracks, and all. This is what happens when you treat celluloid like meat instead of a window.

Felix

Tscherkassky's darkroom assault on The Entity is among the most physically articulate films ever made about cinema itself; the celluloid does not represent violence so much as suffer it. The Vimeo upload appears intact, which is no small mercy for a work this rare.

Margot

Cameraless darkroom contact-copying that folds sprocket holes and optical soundtrack into the image itself - the celluloid is literally being attacked. Top YouTube-style comment on the Vimeo page nails it: nothing else looks like this, because nothing else was made this way.

Zoe

Reviews

Extraordinarily intense and, though only ten minutes in length, relentless in its sensory assault — the kind of violent brilliance that mainstream films such as Fight Club and Se7en attempt to appropriate.

Senses of Cinema

Ranked #322 in the 2012 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time filmmakers' poll — a camera-less film entirely created in the darkroom, dismantling Hollywood horror until only the trauma of materiality remains.

BFI Sight & Sound

Festivals

  • New York Film Festival 1999
  • Diagonale - Festival of Austrian Film 1999, Award for Innovative Cinema
  • DOK Leipzig 1999, Special Award for Innovation
  • Sundance Film Festival 2000
  • International Film Festival Rotterdam 2000
  • Chicago International Film Festival 2000, Silver Hugo for Best Experimental Short Film
  • San Francisco International Film Festival 2000, Best Short Film & Golden Spire New Visions
  • Cannes Film Festival 2002

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