If you weren’t familiar with Peter Tscherkassky’s films and just happened to stumble into a theater screening one, you might mistakenly think you’ve discovered an old surrealist film by Bunuel or Cocteau - a lost sequel to An Andalusian Dog or Blood Of A Poet. But, you’d also have to presume that the film was being projected at the wrong speed, 96 frames per second. Tscherkassky’s reconstruction of existent films is the visual equivalent of a Brion Gysin cut-up, fragments of information that operate at the borderline between the conscious mind and dream.
 
Tscherkassky, an Austrian avant-gardist, manipulates found footage, which he edits using a moviola rather than computers. In the short film Outer Space, Tscherkassky deconstructs Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity, a cheesy knock-off of Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, and re-constructs it as a feverish, psychotic, mindfuck.  Filmmaker Guy Madden describes Outer Space thusly:

“shards of frightened eyes, trembling hands, and violent outbursts of self-defense, presented in multiple exposures too layered to count, too arresting to ignore. Each frame is further entangled with details revealed by a jittery effect (a primitive traveling matte?) which spills fluttering ectoplasmic lightpools from one cubist aspect of the woman to another. The filmmaker mimics the action of nightmares by condensing the original imagery of the feature and displacing it into a new narrative—as in dreams, a narrative not explicitly linked to actual events, but emotionally more true than any rational explanation. Tscherkassky’s shorts are actually considerably more terrifying than the original material.”

 
Note to B-movie fans: Barbara Hershey plays the woman under assault.
Outer Space is the second film in Tscherkassky’s Cinemascope trilogy.
 
Turn out the lights and watch.