Undescribable Perfection

One of my all time favorites.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Fantastic!

"Outer Space" is a film that definitely lives up to its title, for it really is out of this world. As a matter of fact, if I were to name any film I have ever seen that most closely resembles what space aliens likely consume for entertainment on a daily basis, I would easily pick this film. It takes found horror movie footage, and uses wild experimental techniques to further warp and distort the visuals on screen, creating one of the most chilling and atmospheric horror movies I have ever seen.While not for every taste (or MOST tastes even), this film can easily be appreciated by those who have an interest in the more avant garde and dark sides of cinema.

"Outer Space" is a 10-minute black-and--white short film written and directed by Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky 17 years ago. It stars Barbara Hershey briefly after her Oscar nomination and she is the only actress in here. IMDb lists this as a horror film, but if it really is such, then I wasn't scared for a second watching this. It is extremely experimental and I must say I really disliked it. The light effects were almost painful to watch. There is not only no convincing story in here, there is pretty much no story at all. Watching this one makes me really surprised how many awards it won and it also motivates me to stay pretty far away from Tscherkassky's other works. There may be a reason why he never tried making full feature films, even if his short works got great recognition. I do not recommend "Outer Space". Not at all. This little movie also looks way older than it actually is.

Peter Tscherkassky is an Austrian avant-garde filmmaker who works exclusively with found footage. All of his work is done with film and heavily edited in the darkroom, rather than relying on technological modes. This is his second short film in his Cinemascope trilogy, and it is a longer version of the previous entry, Le Arrivee, with all the skullf-ckery and aural destruction amplified tenfold. It starts off with a mystifying shot of a house bathed in stark noirish atmosphere pulsating and trembling as though with energy of its own, like something culled from a Robbe-Grillet film and pushed through a meat-grinder. A woman enters the house. The house soon transforms into a swirling hell, as though pulled and stretched into another dimension with time and space ripping apart in the seams. At some point we're looking at formless chaos, wave after wave of white noise washing over the screen, rolls of film tortured, an epileptic symphony of power electronics conjuring sheer cacodemony. It is a strange thing to behold, this nine minute short, definitely harsh and uninviting but worth a watch for the adventurous viewer.

A woman goes home under auspicious lighting, a vague feeling of voyeurism begins to ignite, and then the film itself begins to attack, split imagery and broken soundtrack igniting into shimmering violent energy and strobe-light intoxication. It could mean that the act of filming itself is a rendering or ripping away of surface of characters, that the instance of "shooting" someone can rupture them. It could be a comment on the impending death of film, as film itself is torn and scraped and pieced back together, eventually reviving itself but losing track of what it once was. It could be an exploration of "space" where the significant dissonance between the spectator and the events (especially during the more flashy scenes) creates a huge disruption of the ability to be sucked in.I don't know. What I do know is that this film is very uncomfortable and for a large part aggressive (something it promises to be, especially considering its placement in the "Experiments in Terror" DVD released by Other Cinema), and not something to be taken lightly.--PolarisDiB