Outer Space (1999)

Outer Space (1999) unfolds as if cinema awakened in the middle of surgery. The head surgeon  assigned? Peter Tscherkassky. This is not the first time cinema has been subjected to the scalpel. On the contrary, it is a great tradition of experimental cinema to figure out how to reorganise its parts in order to find new possibilities in its functioning. Tscherkassky observes a body, laid dawn flat on the table in front of him. A body that seems to be moving along the same lines as other bodies, repeating their patterns, conditioned by a higher power; that of narrative convention. Its organs and limbs move towards and alongside a narrative, conditioning the body of cinema to repeat the same form to the  point that the movements of each individual body, each film, seems undistinguishable.  

Tscherkassky, as many a-previous surgeon, in his practice discovers the articulations buried  underneath skin and narrative still function on their own. Their movements seems horrific. They  expand, contract, intake, ouster and repeat in a horrific manner. He checks if the nerves still work  without the imposing organiser that is narrative, grabs the scalpel, makes an incision in the wrist and pinches the nerve. Funnily enough, the pinky finger moves. There is no organising factor to justify it.  

Saying the film performs an autopsy on classical cinema feels too orderly. Outer Space is closer to a cathedral collapsing inward while the projector continues to pray. So, rather than deconstructing horror cinema from the outside, Tscherkassky performs this kind of internal implosion. By reworking footage from a conventional supernatural film, he reveals that horror does not originate primarily in represented content —ghosts, monsters, clowns, possessions and serial killers— but in the cinematic apparatus itself —discontinuity, projection, repetition, temporal rupture,  and sensory coercion— . 

Many experimental films that tackle the formal possibilities of certain genres tend to explore the motifs around them, but this is not a film about horror per se, instead it is better understood as a film in which horror migrates into the bloodstream of the apparatus itself. Narrative becomes secondary,  almost embarrassed by its own presence. The house, the woman, the scream: these dramatic  elements function secondarily as exposed nerves through which the medium conducts voltage, and  with it form ceases to organise perception to become the object of perception itself. Fragmentation  or instability; are operationalised at the level of cinematic material. Narrative, spatial continuity,  synchronized sound, and spectatorial distance are constantly subjected to structural sabotage.  

The essential operation at hand is displacement.  

Horror is removed from represented events and relocated into the conditions of representation  themselves. Fear no longer emerges from fictional threat but from the realization that the cinematic  image possesses no stable ontology. Every frame is temporary, already decomposing as it appears. We are watching images die at the exact speed of their birth. By relocating horror inside ontology, we find that the terror lies not in what the image shows, but in the unstable conditions that allow the image to appear at all. So, how does this ontological subversion look?  

Celluloid becomes a wounded skin where frames blister and light corrodes whats visible. Sound  arrives like broken glass, dragged across magnetic tape. The image does not represent this  instability; it suffers it. Tscherkassky repeatedly exposes the material supports usually hidden by  classical cinema: frame lines—overexposure—optical layering—asynchronous sound—flicker— mechanical repetition—deterioration of the photochemical image. Frame-lines stutter into visibility. 

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Superimpositions collide like weather systems. The image begins to resemble pressured thoughts, but not rational ones: the kind that arise from insomnia or too much electricity. Thoughts under the pressure of all the air above us, bearing down on our minds. Troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere all pushing down on us. The result is the collapse of the transparency of representation. 

Outer Space (1999)

It is not a new idea to state that the classical apparatus of dominant cinema conceals its mechanisms in order to preserve spectatorial immersion. Like many others, Tscherkassky hypervisibilises this same apparatus. Yet, this exposure is not Brechtian in a purely theoretical or distancing sense. The revelation of cinematic construction does not only produce rational detachment, it also intensifies sensory overload. The film therefore exceeds the simple act of deconstruction. 

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The collapse does not emerge fully formed. Tscherkassky had already been setting the dynamite for said implosion for some years, and the ruble of Outer Space has its predecessors. Motion Picture (1984), among others, had already exposed cinema's dependence on mechanical repetition. The pressure has been building for some time. In Parallel Space: Inter-View (1992), cinematic space already began to fold against itself. And a film like L’Arrivée (1999) achieved transforming the act of the arrival of a train, previously filmed famously by the Lumières, into a collision between movement and the material limits of the image already uncovered before. Outer Space inherits both tendencies and pushes them towards catastrophe. 

There’s a present weaponisation of materiality against the spectator in all of this. Vision ceases to function comfortably at the level of interpretation and becomes physiologically affected. One does not “read” the flicker, it’s there only to be endured. The eye becomes a room filled with moths. In this respect, Tscherkassky moves beyond deconstruction as interpretation and toward what could be called phenomenological aggression. Simply recognising the instability of the medium intellectually is not enough, the audience must experience it bodily 'till cinema transforms into a storm trapped inside a machine. The body of the spectator is forced into contact with the primitive mechanics usually hidden beneath representation:  

interruption, rhythmic shock, retinal saturation,  sonic recursion, stroboscopic assault, p e r c e p t u a l disorientation, retinal exhaustion, the granular brutality of projection itself.  

The image ceases to function semiotically before functioning affectively.  

This is why continuity becomes impossible. Space behaves like burnt fabric. Rooms open and close like mechanical lungs. Walls pulse with the instability of overexposed emulsion. The interior is not actually haunted by a ghost; it is haunted by cinema’s inability to preserve coherent spatial reality. And it is impossible to stabilise this space because cinematic space itself is under assault. Interior and exterior lose distinction. The room does not serve merely to contain the character. The image-field continuously ejects and reconstitutes it through editing violence. The film lacks spatial coherence in favour of prioritising rhythmic and material intensification.  

This main character, a woman at the center of the film, undergoes a particularly disturbing  transformation. The experimental-short aspect of it all is not the only reason the audience doesn’t  see any psychological development, this is too simple of a conclusion, psychology is ignored because psychology presumes continuity of selfhood, and continuity is precisely what the film annihilates.  

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One of the most disturbing operations laid on the table is the transformation of the human figure, the aforementioned “protagonist”, into unstable cinematic matter. The female body is repeatedly fragmented by superimposition and frame collisions until subjectivity itself becomes difficult to locate. Her body is dispersed across exposures, trapped between competing temporalities, repeatedly swallowed by layers of mechanical inscription. She flickers between subject and residue. At moments it feels as though the apparatus is attempting to consume her. Not metaphorically, but photochemically. The image feeds on the body that permits it to exist. The film subjects the figure to processes of mechanical disintegration.

All this is particularly apparent in the treatment of the scream. Repeated and looped, detached from expressive progression and subjected to relentless repetition, the scream ceases to signify emotion. It hardens into texture till it’s sound becomes architecture. Terror is no longer a semantic quality of the film, reduced to signifiers of a genre, it conforms itself to this rhythmic attack on the senses, nailing down its phenomenological aggression. It is physical. Horror migrates from meaning into intensity. A scream repeated enough times becomes a ceiling fan.  

And so, a more studious person could connect these aspects of the film to a broader tradition of structural and materialist cinema. But Tscherkassky could differ from earlier structural filmmakers in one crucial aspect: materiality here is not neutral or analytic. It is hostile. The film stock seems haunted by its own mechanisms. And a new cinema emerges. A self-consuming one.  

This is perhaps the film’s most radical gesture. To reveal cinematic violence as a logical predecesor to narrative violence, quietly exerting its horridness underneath the great big polished veil of narrative. Before the knife, before the ghost, before the possessed house, the possessed doll, the possessed girl, cinema already operates through cutting, fragmentation, forced proximity and invasive light. The medium has always contained a latent brutality concealed beneath narrative smoothness. Tscherkassky simply tears away the curtain. He radicalises these latent properties until the medium itself becomes horrific. What remains is not anti-cinema but cinema stripped to its weather: flicker—impact—grain—recurrence, white light falling endlessly through black space and endlessly falling like snow inside a damaged television.