The Mind-Altering Films of Peter Tscherkassky

Peter Tscherkassky is an Austrian avante-garde filmmaker. He’s one of the few filmmakers who, through his experimental techniques, can create truly mind-altering cinema. There are certainly many films I’d describe as psychedelic – in terms of depicting trips or because of their cinematography and themes – but Tscherkassky’s experimental short films are different to films like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Enter the Void, Midsommar, and Mandy. They distort images and assail the senses in a unique way; like psychedelics, they allow one to view ordinary things in a new way, producing a radical aesthetic experience. However, with Tscherkassky’s films, the journey often feels like an aesthetically interesting bad trip rather than a beautiful and euphoric experience.

I’ve now seen five of Tscherkassky’s films: Tabula Rasa (1989), Outer Space (1999), Dream Work (2001), Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), and The Exquisite Corpus (2015). (I’ve linked to where you can watch them.) Outer Space – his best-known work – was the first one I saw. It was unlike anything I had seen before. Outer Space, like his other films, distorts reality in ways that leave one in a disoriented, confused state. (Dream Work is the most similar in style to Outer Space.) Tscherkassky’s films conflict with consensus reality. They create a sense of instability – the instability of reality. In these respects, the films feel highly psychedelic to me.

Tscherkassky mainly works with found footage. All his work is done in film, which is then heavily edited in the darkroom. So he doesn’t rely on any of the advances in digital film. Chopping, overlaying, or burning fragments of the images directly allows them to take on a frenzied quality that would be difficult to replicate digitally.

Outer Space comprises found footage from Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity (1982), the story of single mother Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) who is repeatedly raped and attacked by a poltergeist. Tscherkassky heavily edited it to create a unique audio-visual assault. Dan North – who teaches in the Depart of Media Communications at Webster University, Leiden, and specialises in special effects technologies in film – writes in a blog post:

[Outer Space] is unsettling, visceral and riveting, a flickering, stuttering monochrome remix, at times looking like a jammed projector, or worse, a projector possessed by some invisible force that wants to speak a different meaning through the material fabric of the original film.

Tscherkassky’s “machine-gun montages”, as North refers to them, distort the original footage to become something extremely novel. Let’s take The Exquisite Corpus as a further example. The film is based on various commercials and erotic films. The way Tscherkassky cuts up the footage and stitches it together creates, at times, a gruesome form of ecstasy: the scenes are orgiastic, but in a way that is more disturbing than traditionally erotic. (It reminds me somewhat of the 1982 psychedelic animated short Malice in Wonderland.) Mike Opal writes for MUBI’s publication Notebook,

Caresses and licks superimpose on themselves, off-kilter and out-of-sync, the edges of the image dilating and contracting. The sexual gestures seem rushed and over-eager.” He adds, “The frame itself warps, aspect ratios expand and contract the visual field, allowing new sensations in new areas.

The film, and its name, are based on the Surrealist drawing and writing technique known as cadavre exquis (‘exquisite corpse’), developed in Paris in 1925. This involves participants blindly contributing to the creation of a single, unified image or sentence. One person draws or writes something on a blank piece of paper; they fold the paper – covering what they drew or wrote – and then pass it to the next person. And so the process repeats. The result is a composition: conjoined elements from different sources.

To make the connection between Tscherkassky’s films and psychedelics a bit more apparent, I want to quote the following from North:

In talking through some of Tscherkassky’s work with my students, we began with questions about how to watch the films. Without a plot or characters to follow, what do we do with a film that eschews the instructive structures of story? Here was a film that may be overwhelming, but which one might not necessarily “understand” in any simple sense. I was fully engaged with it, without the emotional guidance that we usually get from an empathetic relationship between spectator and protagonist, and the sense of being acted upon by the film, almost physically jolted by it (I don’t think I can describe it better than the student who said it was like having his eyes and ears electrocuted), may be designed to make the viewer reflect not upon what the people inside the film are doing, but upon the troubled, complex relationship between spectator and medium. These films are, in the broadest sense, instructional, reminding you of the mechanics of the medium. In its formal dramatisation of the spiky, fragmented, and frayed interplay between the watcher (you and/or me) and the stimulus (the film), a Tscherkassky film obstructs access to the content (the characters and the original narrative) of a film by bringing the materiality of the film stock to the fore.

Here the comparison to the psychedelic experience is twofold. First, we have the effect on us, as a viewer, such as being ‘physically jolted’. This may not sound like a pleasant effect, and it’s not necessarily what one experiences on psychedelics, but it’s an example of ‘being acted upon’ by these films, as North puts it, which is consonant with psychedelic experiences. Psychedelic distortions of reality act upon oneself; like a Tscherkassky film, this can feel like the senses being assailed, creating a sense of the sublime – that mixture of overwhelm and fascination.

Second, a Tscherkassky film brings into focus the medium of film rather than narrative or character. In Outer Space, everything disintegrates, to the point where the material and technical aspects of the film strip (the sprockets and optical soundtrack) intrude into view. The film’s materiality is no longer hidden. Moreover, what would normally be the ‘background’ setting of a film – the house – comes to the fore since it is disintegrating.

In a similar fashion, psychedelics can highlight the ‘medium’ of perceptual reality. We become more interested in the material of what we’re seeing. As the philosopher David Blacker points out in his latest book Deeper Learning with Psychedelics, a psychedelic – in the Heideggerian sense – can remove our sense of objects as ‘ready-to-hand’. We stop viewing objects in terms of their practical use: what we can do with them, or what they are for. Ordinary objects lose their ordinary associations and disclose new worlds: we become fascinated with them aesthetically, instead of seeing them as mundane or pragmatic (Impressionist painters achieve the same effect in their works.)

A Tscherkassky film creates this effect, too. One loses the normal associations that surround an object. It becomes something else. His films, like psychedelics, illustrate that the medium depicting the images and sounds we’re sensing can become distorted in ways that challenge our assumptions about what we’re perceiving. What we see on screen or in sober reality doesn’t have to be static and stable. When objects morph, have fuzzy or loose boundaries, blend into each other, dissolve, or transform, we can start to question the relation of appearance to reality. We are invited to think about how our perceptions are driven by constructed boundaries and categories. Blacker calls this the epistemic loosening effect of psychedelics.

When the medium of film in Tscherkassky’s films is exposed, and becomes the focus, it can feel like ‘reality’ is an artifice. The structure of reality becomes undone, and we see how malleable it is – how it can be stitched together differently. Psychedelics can also have this effect. It may become apparent how consensus reality, like a film, is stitched together in a specific way (with categorisation, narrative, and practicality in mind). But by applying a psychedelic stimulus, this stitching can become undone, thereby disclosing new and aesthetically fascinating worlds. One may even see what appears to be the more fundamental reality creating these appearances – such as atoms, code, or geometric structures.

One of the influences on Gaspar Noé’s film Enter the Void (2009) was Tscherkassky’s Outer Space. (The former depicts a psychedelic journey of life after death.) Noé said in an interview, “In hallucinogenic films, I also think of those of Jordan Belson or even Outer Space by Peter Tscherkassy, ​​an Austrian experimental short film delineating a scene from L’Emprise [The Entity]. It's super trippy, like some of Michel Gondry's clips, where it goes into a mental trip.” Other stylistic influences on Enter the Void from experimental cinema include Kenneth Anger’s work, particularly The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). This film uses some footage of the Hell sequence in the Italian silent film L'Inferno (1911). Near the end, scenes from Anger's film Puce Moment (1949) are interpolated into the layered images and faces. The most prominent mainstream film that influenced Enter the Void was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

It would be fascinating to see more psychedelic cinema draw on experimental filmic influences like Tscherkassky’s work. I think what is ‘psychedelic’ about cinema can involve not just psychedelic themes, colours, patterns, ideas, and realistic recreations of trips themselves but also filmmaking techniques that alter, jolt, disorient, and challenge the mind. There is potential for filmmakers to utilise visual and audio effects, as well as research on triggers of altered states, to create unique psychological experiences for viewers. And in the spirit of Tscherkassky, filmmakers could further mess with viewers’ sense of reality through heavy editing techniques. Psychedelic cinema can be much more than merely visual distortions and kaleidoscopes.