From: Roger Beebe (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Oct 16 2005 - 08:52:49 PDT
A couple notes on the new Tscherkassky thread.
1. The title of his Leone film is "Instructions for a Light and
Sound Machine" (2005). As always, it's a visual tour-de-force, and
he does add some new tricks to his already impressive arsenal. (Here
it's pretty literally an arsenal--guns blazing everywhere.)
2. Tscherkassky came to the University of Florida a couple years ago
for a conference on The Future of the Avant Garde. (Not my title. I
know it sounds more than a bit heavy.) I had hoped to engage him
about a bunch of different theoretical questions including his
relationship to the documentary tradition (where these found
artifacts, especially in his film "Happy End," seem to take most of
their power from their status as documents) and what motivated his
choice of films to work on (and, as part of that, what "work" he
imagined these films were doing beyond their impressive visual
assault). On the former he replied curtly, "I have no relationship
to the documentary tradition." End of story. On the latter, I got a
slightly less curt, "I work on these films because I like them." (He
had just started work on "Instructions..." then, and I wondered what
it meant to work on a film that was already so well known &
celebrated.) So if you're looking for Tscherkassky himself to offer
a spirited theoretical tour of what these films are doing, you'll be
disappointed. That doesn't mean there isn't anything going on there
beyond the visuals, but it doesn't seem to be critical to his own
process in making them.
3. I think it's pronounced, since James asked, chair-KAS-kee.
That's all I've got.
Roger
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