Peter Tscherkassky (born October 3, 1958) is an Austrian avant-garde filmmaker [1] who works primarily with found footage. All of his work is done with film and heavily edited in the darkroom, rather than relying on recent advances in digital film.
Tscherkassky was born October 3, 1958, in Vienna, Austria. He attended the Primary School in Mistelbach from 1965 to 1969 and Jesuit boarding school from 1969 to 1975 in Vienna. He attended BORG (high school) Mistelbach and graduated in June 1977. From 1977 to 1979 Tscherkassky studied journalism and political science as well as philosophy at the University of Vienna. His first encounter with avant-garde film was in January 1978 when he attended a five-day lecture series by P. Adams Sitney at the Austrian Film Museum.
Tscherkassky began filming in 1979 when he acquired Super-8 equipment and before the end of the year he had scripted and started off the shooting of Kreuzritter. Throughout his career he conceived numerous film festivals, including “The Light of Periphery: Austrian Avant-Garde Film, 1957–1988” (1988), “Im Off der Geschichte” (1990), “Found Footage: Filme aus gefundenem Material” (1991), and “Unknown Territories: The American Independent Film” (1992). He was also the founding member of the newly Austria Filmmakers Cooperative which began in 1982 and resigned from his position there in 1993. His work Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the series "Quinzaine des réalisateurs."
A Movie is a 1958 experimental collage film by American artist Bruce Conner. It combines pieces of found footage taken from various sources such as newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, all set to a score featuring Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome.
Shadows is a 1959 American independent drama film directed by John Cassavetes about race relations during the Beat Generation years in New York City. The film stars Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, and Hugh Hurd as three black siblings, though only one of them is dark-skinned enough to be considered African American. The film was initially shot in 1957 and shown in 1958, but a poor reception prompted Cassavetes to rework it in 1959. Promoted as a completely improvisational film, it was intensively rehearsed in 1957, and in 1959 it was fully scripted.
The Entity is a 1982 American supernatural horror film directed by Sidney J. Furie, and written by Frank De Felitta, who adapted his 1978 novel of the same name. The film stars Barbara Hershey as a single mother in Los Angeles who is raped and tormented by an invisible assailant.
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is a 38-minute avant-garde short film by Kenneth Anger. It was filmed in December 1953 and completed in 1954. Anger created two other versions of this film in 1966 and the late 1970s. According to him, the film takes the name "pleasure dome" from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's atmospheric 1816 poem Kubla Khan. Anger was inspired to make the film after attending a Halloween party called "Come as your Madness" hosted by artist Renate Druks. The film has gained cult film status.
Ronald Mann, credited professionally as Ron Mann, is a Canadian documentary film director.
Sans Soleil is a 1983 French documentary film directed by Chris Marker. It is a meditation on the nature of human memory, showing the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory, and how, as a result, the perception of personal and global histories is affected. The title Sans Soleil is from the song cycle Sunless by Modest Mussorgsky, a brief fragment of which features in the film. Sans Soleil is composed of stock footage, clips from Japanese movies and shows, excerpts from other films as well as documentary footage shot by Marker.
David Edward Gatten is an American experimental filmmaker and moving image artist. Since 1996 Gatten's films have explored the intersection of the printed word and moving image, cataloging the variety of ways in which texts functions in cinema as both language and image, often blurring the boundary between these categories. His 16mm films often employee cameraless techniques, combined with close-up cinematography and optical printing processes. In addition to the ongoing 16mm films, Gatten is now making hybrid 16mm/digital works and has completed an entirely digital feature-length project called The Extravagant Shadows.
Virgil Widrich is an Austrian director, screenwriter, filmmaker and multimedia artist.
François Miron is a French-Canadian experimental filmmaker also working in documentary and fiction.
Otar Iosseliani was a Georgian film director, known for movies such as Falling Leaves, Pastorale and Favourites of the Moon. Iosseliani received a lifetime achievement honor – the CineMerit Award at the Munich International Film Festival in 2011 for his career accomplishments.
Peter Kubelka is an Austrian filmmaker, architect, musician, curator and lecturer. His films, few in number, are known to be carefully edited and extremely brief. He is known for his 1966 Unsere Afrikareise, and for other very short and intricately-edited films.
Take the 5:10 to Dreamland is a 1976 short experimental film by Bruce Conner, using the technique of found footage. It is composed out of found images from the 1940s–1950s from different sources such as educational hm and soundtrack. It is closely related to Valse Triste, another found footage short by Bruce Conner.
Michael Loebenstein is a writer, curator and as of 1 October 2017 the director of the Austrian Film Museum. From October 2011 to January 2017 he held the post of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA). Since 2013 he is serving as Secretary General of FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives.
Eve Heller, born in 1961 in Amherst, is an American filmmaker based in Vienna, Austria.
Leslie Thornton is an American avant-garde filmmaker and artist.
The Austrian Film Museum is a film archive and museum located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Peter Konlechner and Peter Kubelka in 1964 as a non-profit organization.
Schwechater is a 1958 experimental short film by Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka. It is the second entry in his trilogy of metrical films, between Adebar and Arnulf Rainer.
Our Trip to Africa is a 1966 Austrian avant-garde short film by Peter Kubelka, originally commissioned as a travel diary documenting a wild game hunt. Kubelka used intricate editing strategies to produce a work about anti-colonialism.
Gertie Fröhlich was a Czechoslovak-born Austrian painter, graphic designer and the initiator of the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna. She was an important figure in the post-war Austrian painting and experimental film world, where often from behind the scenes she supported numerous artists and institutions.
Adebar is a 1957 Austrian avant-garde short film directed by Peter Kubelka. It is the first entry in Kubelka's trilogy of metrical films, followed by Schwechater and Arnulf Rainer. Adebar is the first film to be edited entirely according to a mathematical rhythmic strategy.