This text appeared within the July 18, 2025 version of The Movie Remark Letter, our free weekly e-newsletter that includes authentic movie criticism and writing. Join the Letter right here.

L’Arrivée (Peter Tscherkassky, 1997/1998)

Peter Tscherkassky shall be receiving the Underground Spirit Award for “excellent work in impartial filmmaking” on the Paliç European Movie Competition this month, and it’s simple to see why. Ever since he began experimenting with discovered footage within the Eighties, the Austrian auteur has made one masterful movie after one other, from mischievous minimalist works like Shot-Countershot (1987) to densely textured cubist movies like Outer Area (1999) and Dream Work (2001). His most up-to-date movies are simply as modern and thrilling as his earlier work. The Beautiful Corpus (2015) incorporates a torrent of erotically charged photographs accompanied by musique concrète composed by Dirk Schaefer: a mesmerizing mélange of thunder, waves, crickets, and fowl cries. And Tscherkassky’s most up-to-date movie, Prepare Once more (2021), synthesizes pictures of trains from function movies and ads with a phantasmagoria of photographs from movie historical past, equivalent to a hypnotic rotorelief from Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926) and Danny using his tricycle via the Overlook Lodge in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

I first grew to become taken with having a dialog with Tscherkassky after studying “The Story Behind Outer Area,” a captivating essay that he contributed to a brand new quantity known as Discovered Footage & Collage Movies: The Artist’s Voice (edited by César Ustarroz, Discovered Footage Journal, 2025). In it, he recounts the quite a few accidents and contingencies that led to the creation of his most celebrated movie, together with how he acquired a print of Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity (1982) from fellow filmmaker Martin Arnold and the way he obtained the concept to make use of a laser pointer to contact print and collage photographs from that movie. We linked through Zoom this previous April to debate his work with discovered footage and his fascination with Futurism.

What’s your relationship to mainstream narrative cinema? Are your works a critique of mainstream cinema?

No. I was extremely vital of mainstream cinema, however now I like common cinema. I like TV sequence. The Sopranos, The Wire, Succession—you title it. I’ve seen all of it. I like cinema in all its varieties. And I respect my discovered footage. If I exploit industrial narrative cinema, there’s all the time a deep respect for what has been completed in these movies. I simply attempt to create one thing fully new out of the preexisting narrative footage.

How would you like spectators of your movies to consider the unique movies that you simply’re remodeling? For instance, you’ve made two nice movies—Outer Area and Dream Work—that rework footage from a horror movie known as The Entity. In your view, does a spectator achieve a fuller appreciation of your movies by seeing The Entity? Or is data of the supply materials irrelevant to the works you’re creating?

Seeing the supply supplies disturbs the notion of my movies. It doesn’t assist in any method. That’s why I choose to make use of comparatively unknown footage. The Entity is sort of obscure. There have been double-feature screenings that confirmed each The Entity and Outer Area. It didn’t work.

I simply learn your essay “The Story Behind Outer Area.” I used to be fascinated to learn the way you began to make use of a laser pointer to engrave chosen components of photographs from a preexisting movie onto unexposed movie inventory.

Sure. I used to be on the road and I noticed three boys. They had been 13 or fourteen. Two of the boys had been about to purpose a laser pointer on the different boy’s eyes. He was the smallest of the three. I intervened. I mentioned, “Are you loopy? You may’t try this!” They stopped torturing the small boy. As I saved strolling, I all of a sudden thought, “Perhaps a laser pointer might work as a light-weight supply in a darkroom.” I had made movies earlier than in a darkroom utilizing the enlarger as a light-weight supply, protecting some components of the imagery and exposing different components. However I had by no means used a laser pointer. Fortunately, I already had a extremely delicate orthochromatic movie inventory that labored with the laser pointer.

While you began to make use of the laser pointer, did that let you be extra exact in selecting which a part of the supply materials you needed to make use of in your movie?

That’s an fascinating query. Sure and no. Outer Area and Dream Work had been primarily made with the laser pointer, and one single body in these movies is usually composed of 5 to seven layers of discovered imagery. My movies have a human contact. Since there’s so little purple mild within the darkroom, I don’t see precisely which half I’m going to repeat. So, I’ve to maneuver the laser pointer round inside the body to seek for what I intend to repeat, and that’s one thing that makes the movie so human. I attempt to make movies that would not be made with a pc. You may not inform a pc, “Discover the face of Carla [the main character from The Entity, played by Barbara Hershey], however don’t discover it instantly. Search for it earlier than you discover it.” So, whereas the laser pointer is exact, there’s a sure sort of randomness as effectively.

Like Outer Area and Dream Work, your most up-to-date movie, Prepare Once more, is densely layered. Usually a number of photographs (or a minimum of components of photographs) are superimposed in a single body. Nevertheless, Outer Area and Dream Work solely use footage from a single movie: The Entity. Prepare Once more, then again, makes use of quite a few sources. There are photographs from very early movies just like the Lumière brothers’ Employees Leaving the Lumière Manufacturing unit (1895) and Edwin S. Porter’s The Nice Prepare Theft (1903). There are additionally photographs from a lot of avant-garde movies, equivalent to Man Ray’s Return to Cause (1923) and Jean Mitry’s Pacific 231 (1949). There’s even footage from The Shining. What impressed you to create a movie that options so many photographs from canonical movies?

All of my movies take care of cinema. My two most up-to-date movies, The Beautiful Corpus and Prepare Once more, are particularly within the particular creative potentialities of analog movie materials and the equipment of cinema, so I attempted to match the equipment of the practice with the equipment of the movie projector and the analog digicam. I current a practice passing by, and I undertaking onto that practice items of classical avant-garde cinema. This creates a powerful connection between trains and cinema and alludes to the truth that they’re each youngsters of the economic revolution. And movie historical past is filled with practice movies. It’s actually wonderful.

Earlier than you made Prepare Once more, you made L’Arrivée (1997/1998), which can be about trains.

Sure, Prepare Once more refers to L’Arrivée. The latter is an homage to the Lumière brothers, who made the very first practice movie: The Arrival of a Prepare at La Ciotat Station (1896). The title Prepare Once more additionally refers to a movie by Kurt Kren known as 37/78 Tree Once more (1978), which itself refers to an earlier movie that Kren made known as 3/60 Bushes in Autumn (1960). The truth is, the time that elapsed between Bushes in Autumn and Tree Once more is similar because the period of time that handed between after I made L’Arrivée and after I began engaged on Prepare Once more: 18 years. So I devoted Prepare Once more to the reminiscence of Kurt Kren.

What have you ever been engaged on since Prepare Once more?

My subsequent movie shall be impressed by Futurism, the Italian artwork motion from the start of the twentieth century. Roughly talking it lasted from 1909 to 1944, however the heyday occurred between 1910 and 1920—earlier than, throughout, and after World Struggle I. And the Futurists had been the very first artists who made avant-garde movies. Sadly, most of the movie negatives and prints had been misplaced within the Second World Struggle throughout a bombardment in Milan.

Are you aware what sort of footage you’re going to be working with?

Sure. Oh God. I’ve obtained a lot footage. An excessive amount of footage. However I’m primarily utilizing Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) and Capricorn One (Peter Hyams, 1977) with Elliott Gould.

Are these movies that you simply like? Or do you simply discover them helpful for this undertaking?

Helpful. The Futurists had been taken with visible dynamism, in order that’s what I’m searching for. What the Futurists did with cinema was like a promise that was by no means fulfilled. I’m making an attempt to realize a number of the targets that that they had with cinema—and likewise with their work.

In nearly all my work, I attempt to set up a connection to early movie historical past, however within the case of the Futurists, I’m not alluding to particular movies. The early summary movie experiments of 1912 by Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna have been solely misplaced, and descriptions of Vita Futurista (Arnaldo Ginna, 1916)—sadly solely three minutes survived—point out a extra Surrealist vein that I already addressed in Dream Work and The Beautiful Corpus. So, this time, I’m pursuing the spirit of Futurism as expressed in Marinetti’s first manifesto: “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a brand new magnificence: the fantastic thing about pace…A roaring motor automotive which appears to run on machine-gun hearth is extra stunning than the Victory of Samothrace.”

This emphasis of pure dynamism ties in with Giacomo Balla’s motion-study work, makes an attempt at capturing the dynamics of a passing automotive or the flight of a swallow (as in his painted variations of Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs). All of this helps me choose motifs: the automotive, aerial imagery, the massive metropolis—but in addition battle, which the Futurists hailed as “the one hygiene of the world.” These themes function some extent of departure—no extra, no much less.

The very fact is that many Futurists had been extremely skeptical of cinema or rejected it fully. Umberto Boccioni had critical doubts, for instance, however I’m making an attempt to make a movie that may persuade him!

This interview was made potential by the ExFM SIG (the Experimental Movie and Media Scholarly Curiosity Group), an affiliate of SCMS (The Society for Cinema and Media Research). The writer wish to thank the co-chairs of the ExFM SIG—John Powers, Srijita Banerjee, and Oksana Chefranova—for his or her assist in facilitating this dialog. The writer would additionally wish to thank Eve Heller for her perceptive options and corrections.

Justin Remes is an affiliate professor of movie research at Iowa State College. He’s the writer of Movement(much less) Photos: The Cinema of Stasis (Columbia College Press, 2015) and Absence in Cinema: The Artwork of Displaying Nothing (Columbia College Press, 2020).