Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "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.

Rodrigo Amaro "Outer Space" is a short film directed by Peter Tscherkassky and in it we sort of see a horror film about a woman played by Barbara Hershey (archive footage taken from one of her films) fighting a blurry celluloid. Or at least, that's my view of this film, she's trapped in a defectuous film reel present in the plot and that is basically the whole film.The director impresses us with a unusual visual, a kaleidoscope of images and strange sounds where Hershey tries to do everything to get out. There are times when the images are so immersed in itself that creates a whole new cinematic experience, flashlights, the reel forms, noises and more noises, and for odd reasons it is a interesting thing. It doesn't make you bored but it also doesn't make you appalled; it's just a new thing and it's nice to watch it. It's unpretentious, but not that easy to follow or to feel really interested in it if you haven't seen different things in all types of films. In terms of horror it's not something to make you feel scared but it's made to get you confused, wondering what those hypnotic images are trying to say and trying to show.Do you enjoy new cinematic forms, new experiences? Go for it, it's amazing and there's a great technical quality (and I'm not sounding ironic despite the affected film reel). 8/10

chaos-rampant 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.

Polaris_DiB 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