Peter Tscherkassky's The Entity

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In the early 2000s, Peter Tscherkassky bought a 35mm print of The Entity (1982) for fifty dollars. The low price was a major motivating factor behind his purchase, but the acquisition also fit with his next project: working with the materiality of film by experimenting with the role of the tangible celluloid print. From Sidney Furie’s feature film, Tscherkassky created two short works: Out- er Space (2000) and Dream Work (2002). Contrary to a first assumption, The Entity is not an indifferent, raw material or a generic trash whose destiny is to be transmuted into avant-garde art. Tscherkassky recomposes and transforms The Entity, giving it a new form, but his formal inventions are, in many cases, clearly inspired by the style of the original …show more content…

When the attacks continue, Carla invites two college students with an interest in the paranormal to visit her house. After seeing the ghost in action, they agree to help Carla defeat her invisible attacker. The story is based on the 1974 Doris Bither case: an haunting which occurred in 1974 at Culver City, California where a woman named Doris Bither alleged the ghosts of three Asian men were raping her. Before staring to work on Outer Space, Peter Tscherkassky watches The Entity “ten thousand times”, to learn the footage by heart until at a certain point the story starts to crumble and he does not see it anymore. In this way the Film itself begins to play a main role as important as the actress. As a consequence of that preliminary approach, Outer Space smashes the narrative of The Entity and suppresses all secondary characters to concentrates solely on Barbara Hershey. Her image is constantly split, doubled, tripled and her screams are punctured by the scratches and glitches of the film and the mechanical groan of the optical soundtrack. While in The Entity mirrors are used to multiply the images of the characters, Tscherkassky forges a successive flow of moments that in the original film are very far apart and through his selective printing technique, he makes single frames from bits of many frames in The

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