Something of a mixed blessing, this collection of seven films from Peter Tscherkassky provides a welcome chance to see rare and compelling work, albeit in a medium that it’s less than ideally suited to. To paraphrase the only “extra” this package includes, a brief but articulate interview included in the DVD booklet, Films from a Dark Room is perhaps best taken as an invitation to watch these works projected at the next available opportunity—the film medium itself is so integral to the conception of these works, all of which are “cameraless” pieces made from found footage and using various darkroom techniques. The process exploits properties inherent to analogue film and, particularly, in the case of the trilogy (L’Arrive, Outer Space and Dream Work), the content makes self-conscious reference to the projector itself. The exception is Miniaturen, labelled as a bonus film, which was made from Super-8 material projected onto frosted glass and reshot.

The limitations imposed on these works by DVD are not exclusively theoretical; each film contains such intricate combinations of images that one is often left to wonder what we might be missing. What is gained, of course, is the repeated viewing that a disc allows; these are films that expand and assert themselves upon close, repeated scrutiny. Having acknowledged this issue in the included interview, it is somewhat surprising that no technical supplements are provided to assist with calibration such as color bars or a contrast aid as found on, for instance, The Short Films of David Lynch’s disc. It may seem like a fussy complaint, but given the nature of Tscherkassky’s films, such aids can sometimes make all the difference.

Each of the cinematic trilogy pieces is an aggressively assembled, dense amalgam of imagery. Outer Space, for instance, is a now-legendary recombining of fragments from Sidney J. Furie’s 1981 The Entity into a suffocating and unrelenting experience. The film, like Tscherkassky’s inquisitiveness, is restless, showing its sprocket holes and apparently preferring to spend as much time in the projector’s gate as out of it. There’s also a fearless frivolity on display in the technique, a curiosity that’s willing to take narrative-representational film apart, piece by piece, undaunted by what might be found inside.

In each case traces of the material’s original narrative thrust remain, but the films approach this original intention with extreme caution. They’re more concerned with deconstructing the basic psychological and aesthetic building blocks of their raw materials. The films are heady but never ascetic; they simply privilege pleasures other than the preoccupation with dramatic progress. Motion Picture, on the other hand, makes for a much more austere—though no less theoretically interesting—contrast. The film’s starting point is a still frame from the Lumière Brothers’ 1895 Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory; Tscherkassky then projects the frame onto strips of unexposed film and connects the strips to form the final piece. The experience is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the trilogy but, as Austrian Filmmuseum director Alexander Horvath points out, “...whilst thinking about this process, it is easy to lose your mind.”
—OMAR ODEH