The Secrets of Nefertiti's Bust
Image - Generated using midjourney AI
Prompt - "an arthouse black and white movie still in the style of Peter Tscherkassky, multiple layers, experimental cinema --ar 16:9"
A woman enters a house, and we folllow her, unsure where we are, in time. We may be part of the apparatus filming her, caught in a kind of wormhole within the filmstrip.
This is the optical collage of Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space, an experimental / avant-garde (short) film that uses the original footage from the film, The Entity (1982) starring Barbara Hershey
Without clear designations that would typically be associated with movement-image; does Deleuze's taxonomy strain to describe what we are watching or does it still hold as a lens to understand the philosophical concepts of Bergson and Deleuze?
“I place a strip of unexposed 35 mm film on a piece of cardboard that measures 15 by 100 centimeters. The filmstrip itself equals 48 frames in length, which comes to two seconds of projection time. ... I place one meter of found footage on top of my unexposed film stock. ... Subsequently I copy the found footage onto the raw material by exposing it to light. After copying details from 48 frames of found footage, I repeat the process several times over again, exposing the same single strip of raw stock to several different strips of found footage. In this way, I can mix details from entirely disparate sequences and each individual frame becomes an intricate optical collage. Parts of Outer Space include up to five multiple exposures"
Maureen Turim, “Tscherkassky: Works of Dreams and Shadows,” in Film Unframed. A History of Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema, ed. Peter Tscherkassky (Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2012), pp. 206–221.
Exploring Cinematic Space
Understanding Tscherkassky's method with the medium frames how we might use Deleuze's taxonomy to understand a litter deeper, the short film.
Tscherkassky uses the conditions of cinema to enter the fiction and restructure it. The sounds of the projector, the apparently visible aspects of the celluloid violently interact with Hershey, the house and it's contents.
In the 'everyday' usage of Deleuze's taxonomy we are looking for the logic of the the sensory-motor schema. We typically can identify the perception-image, affectation image, and action-image. The question now arises where are these given that the cinematic space is barely navigatable, and the subject or character is glitching and reverberating across the celluloid?
What we see from the start is not a image that is organised by the movement-image components. The sensory system does not exist in a stable sense at all
Frame
“The frame structures space as an almost closed system, defining characters, props, light, and sound as a compositional whole. Yet, as Deleuze argues, the frame always gestures toward a greater totality beyond itself—what he calls ‘the whole.’
In Outer Space the frame introduces the closed system of the house. Within the house the shots of the character are understood to be within this frame.
The sense of the 'whole', the world beyond the frame takes on a new meaning. Tscherkassky introduces the idea that the off camera space is outside the photogram. The soundtrack of the projector, the perforations on the film, the apparent fogging that would arise from the mechanical existance of the materials used become part of the the image.
Delueze's 'whole' literally becomes the outer space of the collage method.
The Outer Space performs a mutation of out-of-field:
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Classical out-of-field: an unseen agent, threat, or space that could enter the framed world. (In my analaysis of The Truman Show, this was Christof for example)
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Tscherkassky’s out-of-field: the cinematic apparatus is the Outside. This is not representable as a character, but as an invasive condition of visibility/audibility. (Given that the original footage is taken from the film, The Entity, where a unseen Poltergeist assualts and rapes a woman, there are parallels with the remake)
The frame is no longer a window; it not becomes a membrane being punctured.
Shot
The Shot is usually embued with the sense of continuity. This is the slice of duration (movement-image). In this 'shot' we are faced with overalys, glitches and repeating images. Therefore it is not clear what is being perceived or who or what is doing the perceiving.
- Perception-image
- There is no definitive centre to this Shot. It is unstable. However, we are able to make a little sense of it. We engage with the character emerging from the chaos.
- Affectation Image
- Again we can engage with the apparent emotion at play. Hershey is broadcasting through the static, but it all seems somewhat suspended. This is a pure-affect. It does not appear to be heading towards action. This is a kind pure 'horror'
- Action Image
- There is a kind of motion but one caught in a loop. This might point towards the emergence of the time-image but because of the interference from 'outer-space' It does not cleanly emerge.
Outer Space pushes the impending horror from “I can react” toward “I can only undergo.” We become pertrified.
Excerpt - at 2mins20
Montage
We might consider that the montage propels our thought forward. we expect to be 'going' to the next thought, or the next emotion. This helps us make the story or narrative coherent in our minds.
This montage does not do this. The montage here is disconnected from a traditiional sensory-motor continuum. Zooming out we see the character afraid, then perhaps an attack, the outer space takes prominence, the attack continues, or perhaps another one, then the aftermath
The force of the outer space untethers times and space. We are floating fiction space, filmstrip space, projection space. As viewers our experience of viewing becomes horror, and we are suspended in this space taking the full brunt (affect)
