FOUND FOOTAGE

Live music premieres by Clara Iannotta, Simon Løffler and Nikel for Peter Tscherkassky’s films
Fri 20 July 2018, 21.00
Centralstation (Saal)

Peter Tscherkassky: Cinemascope Trilogy
L’Arrivée (1997/98)
Outer Space (1999), Music: Clara Iannotta – World Premiere / Commission of the Darmstadt Summer Course
Dream Work (2001), Music: Simon Løffler – World Premiere / Commission of the Darmstadt Summer Course

Ensemble Nikel

It can be said that in his films, Austrian-born Peter Tscherkassky (*1958) dives into the subconscious of cinema, bringing its hidden structural layers to light – both in a material and a psychological sense. In doing so, he subjects found footage to an analog, multi-stage process of copying and exposure. Frame by frame he copies it by hand onto unexposed film material in the darkroom, fragmenting and reassembling it in the process and in turn superimposing something else onto it. Tscherkassky thus turns the medium itself into the film’s subject matter. What he is concerned with is creating a cinematic experience that “may be physically felt and triggers a new kind of active looking.” In all of this he explicitly draws on the notions of displacement and condensation as described in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams: “The re-interpretation in terms of content of the filmic source material occurs through its being ‘displaced’ from its original context, while at the same time being ‘condensed’ by way of frequent multiple exposure,” says Tscherkassky.

On the suggestion of Graz’s impuls festival, several of the Ulysses network partners have commissioned music relating to Peter Tscherkassky’s CinemaScope Trilogy: the Darmstadt Summer Course (Clara Iannotta, Simon Løffler), IRCAM (Javier Elipe Gimeno, Ariadna Alsina), Gaudeamus (Boris Bezemer, Mikołaj Laskowski), impuls (Mirela Ivičević, Julien Malaussena). All compositions are being created for the Israeli-Swiss ensemble Nikel, with the first two pieces for the films Outer Space (1999) and Dream Work (2001) now being performed live in Darmstadt. In addition, we have launched a call for new electronic pieces for the two-minute film L’Arrivée.

Co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union
Supported by the Ulysses Network

For more information, click here.