PETER TSCHERKASSKY - Exquisite Ecstasies
"'Approaching the Exquisite Corpus' was an alternative title we considered for this DVD release. It would have indicated how the films introduced here from my early Super 8 phase already evidence an artistically consistent path leading to my most recent production to date, THE EXQUISITE CORPUS, and highlighted my endeavor since the 1980s to make the specific qualities of the analog film medium sensuously tangible in the form of "exquisite ecstasies". No matter how various the imagery of BLOOD-LETTING, FILM OF LOVE, HOLIDAY FILM, TABULA RASA or THE EXQUISITE CORPUS, each of these films crystalizes an essential impulse at the heart of my entire artistic work: to expose the utterly distinct nature of analog transferrable to any other medium."
ADERLASS – Blood-letting (1981)
"ADERLASS (1981) is a youthful attempt to process the inheritance of the Vienna Activists using a Super-8 camera. A performance is staged in front of the camera by Armin Schmickl Sebastiano."
- Peter Tscherkassky
“FILM OF LOVE revolves around a further elemental component of cinema, namely the individual film frame. It constitutes my first precisely measured work, and numbers among the few films I have made worthy of being termed ‘structural’. Here again Peter Kubelka’s influence (FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA) cannot be missed.”
- Peter Tscherkassky
"HOLIDAY FILM…takes up the difference between reality and its image, questioning cinematic illusionism. I used footage shot in the summer of 1982 during a holiday in Germany’s Harz mountains as my source material. HOLIDAY FILM aspired to translate the privacy and intimacy to be expected of a vacation film into an encounter with the private and intimate nature of filmic materiality itself. A key to the overall concept of HOLIDAY FILM was to embody in a nutshell the emancipatory movement of Modernist art toward pure abstraction.”
- Peter Tscherkassky
TABULA RASA (1987/89)
"The target of TABULA RASA (1987/89) is the heart of cinema: Voyeuristic desire as the pre-condition for any cinematic pleasure is here at stake. What Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan have established in theory is rendered as film in TABULA RASA."
- Gabriele Jutz
THE EXQUISITE CORPUS (2015)
"A dream narrative of a sleeping beauty -a nudist found unconscious on a beach- intertwining different films, different bodies, caresses, screams of shock and cries of ardour, THE EXQUISITE CORPUS works to collapse the line between the filmed body and the celluloid Tscherkassky meticulously manipulates in his darkroom...This is where Tscherkassky's love for celluloid is wedded to his source films' love for flesh, where the pathways to climax -narrative and sexual- are built from the same component parts of mystery, attraction, rhythm, repetition, variation, new sensations, and ecstasy."
- Daniel Kasman
Contents
Format: DVD-PAL / Region 0
(No Regional Code); DVD/DSL Bundle
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ADERLASS - Blood-Letting
(Austria, 1981)
Director: Peter Tscherkassky
• 11 minutes
• Super-8
• Color
• No dialogue
_________________________________________
LIEBESFILM
(Austria, 1982)
Director: Peter Tscherkassky
• 8 minutes
• Super-8
• B&W
• Silent
_________________________________________
URLAUBSFILM
(Austria, 1983)
Director: Peter Tscherkassky
• 17 minutes
• Super-8
• Color
• No dialogue
_________________________________________
TABULA RASA
(Austria, 1987/89)
Director: Peter Tscherkassky
• 17 minutes
• Super-8
• Color
• No dialogue
_________________________________________
THE EXQUISITE CORPUS
(Austria, 2015)
Director: Peter Tscherkassky
• 19 minutes
• 35mm
• B&W
• Sound
______________________________________
Total Running Time: 01:04:00
Booklet Text: Peter Tscherkassky (24 pages, Bilingual English & German)
Published By: Index Edition
Institutional Price: $250 (DVD only); $500 DVD/DSL bundle (plus shipping)
To order call: 212.280.8654 or click here for information on ordering by fax, e-mail or post.