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FILM COMMENT
May/June 2002
SPACE INVADERS
Sidney J. Furieâs 1982 film The Entity was loosely based on a true story. Peter Tscherkasskyâs Outer Space and Dream Work are loosely based on The Entity. Alice Lovejoy explains.
above: dream work
Peter Tscherkasskyâs ten-minute 1999 film Outer Space, the second part of his ãCinemascope Trilogy,ä begins over the sound of a running film projector. The image ÷ in luminously grainy, scratched black-and-white ÷ is canted, off-center, as though projected onto a wall from a worn-out print. A woman approaches a house, hesitates, and reaches for the doorknob. As she walks through rooms, the visuals gradually degrade ÷ the frame fills with multiple exposures, and at times the images look as though theyâve been selectively exposed, certain areas of the frame burned with light, others obscured. With an electrical buzzing, the physical space surrounding the woman starts to break up: windows and mirrors shatter, images bleed into each other and disintegrate, until finally, all that remains legible are sprocket holes and the optical track ÷ the celluloid itself.
The film snaps back to coherence with a full-frame shot of the womanâs face pushed against a mirror, screaming in pain. Another series of barely legible images, oscillating between negative and positive, gives way to the repeated gesture of the woman hurling a lamp at an offscreen target, and in what might be a reverse angle, mirrors smashing. Itâs as if the violence enacted upon her causes the woman to realize her own potential for violence÷an uneasy sort of empowerment, particularly when the target of her aggression seems to be her own (mirror) image. The film ends with shots of her eye, doubled and then tripled; fragments of her speech; and finally her face, again doubled, then tripled÷as if searching for a perpetrator, but finding only herself.
Outer Space, and a later Tscherkassky film, Dream Work (For Man Ray), are constructed from images and sounds taken from Sidney J. Furieâs 1982 horror film The Entity, in which Barbara Hershey plays a single California mother who is repeatedly beaten and raped by an invisible assailant. A battery of shrinks tag Hershey a textbook Freudian case (ãSheâs masturbating!ä exclaims one cigar-smoking psychoanalyst): her rapes are dreams, born from sexual abuse in early childhood and a latent desire to sleep with both her father and her teenage son. When analysis proves futile, a team of paranormal psychologists sets out to prove that the rapes are real÷or as real as they can be, given thereâs a supernatural being involved.
The Entity, unlike most horror films, is not simply creepy, but arrestingly graphic and genuinely disturbing. With its many low-angle and/or off-center shots, it is imbued with an eerie sense of destabilization, and the visuals often have the disjointed quality of Surrealist film or painting (Hershey, saying good-night to her daughters, pulls down the covers to find one child upside down in bed, her feet where her head should be). Ultimately, perhaps most eerily, this destabilization centers on Hershey herself ÷ through the course of the attacks, she loses all self-possession, her eyes become vacant, her gaze detached. ãNormalä interactions seem to serve only as noise in the midst of this tranquil state. As noted in its end-crawl, The Entity is based on a true story. Perhaps the real-life victim was just off her rocker, or maybe the attacks were actually the work of a malevolent spirit. Either way, a diagnosis that places blame for violence squarely on the victim (such as the classically misogynistic diagnosis of hysteria) is undeniably damaging÷damage that is registered in extreme close-ups of Hersheyâs face and eyes, which in turn become a recurring visual motif in Tscherkasskyâs films.
For both Outer Space and Dream Work, Tscherkassky contact-printed images from the Furie film onto an undeveloped 35mm negative, which he hand-processed and printed. Shots and scenes were then re-sequenced, repeated, and elided to assemble new, compact narratives. At its core, The Entity is about the links between what we see and what we know. The film hinges on Barbara Hersheyâs attempts to convince her psychiatrist (Ron Silver) that the rapes are real÷actually happen÷even though her attacker is invisible. Her claim to non-visual (and unverifiable÷though the audience witnesses it in painful detail) experience is lost between the psychologists and the paranormal researchers÷on one hand, the psychologists explain her experience as purely psychological; on the other, the researchers devise an elaborate lab experiment to capture The Entity and make it visible. With multiple exposures, inversion, and abstraction, Outer Space and Dream Work play off issues of visual truth÷the question of whether or not images carry an indexical relationship to something that was really there, especially in the wake of trauma, and the ways in which aesthetic disorder mirrors psychic disorder.
The eleven-minute Dream Work (For Man Ray) (01) progresses from Outer Spaceâs tense conclusion. In Outer Space, accountability for violence shifted from the ãhaunted houseä to Hershey, perhaps haunted herself. Dream Work moves deeper inside Hersheyâs subjective experience: her dreams. Like Outer Space, Dream Work opens on a threshold ÷ in the earlier film, the door of a house, here, the sphere of action moves directly to the bedroom, an open window and a blind flapping in the breeze. Over the sound of a ticking clock, Hershey undresses, brushes her hair, climbs into bed, and begins to dream. Shots of faces, opening and closing doors, and her own footsteps play over her face, in multiple exposures, both negative and positive. An alarm clock rings and the cutting accelerates, becoming frenzied. Negative forms and barely recognizable images dance around her head as her breathing becomes heavier÷perhaps orgasmic.
The peak of aesthetic disorder marked by her apparent orgasm unleashes a string of violent images. In one, Silverâs face is superimposed onto Hersheyâs, and two hands seem to hold her knees apart as she struggles and cries. Negative images of nails ÷ produced by light projected over them onto the film ÷ play over the entire frame. The scene, one of The Entityâs rapes, intercuts with shots of faces ÷ children, a man, the woman ÷ and returns to Hershey sleeping: the dreamer. The ticking clocks fade out and give way to a mechanical sound, sprocket holes again become visible, and two hands, in negative, appear with scissors and begin to alter the actual celluloid, placing small bead-like objects on it. Another alarm clock rings, and the image dissolves under the objects that are placed on the film.
Dream Work takes its name from Freudâs theories of dreams and dream analysis. Tscherkassky writes that his film ãrealizes the central mechanism by which dreams produce meaning, the dream work, as Sigmund Freud described it: displacement· and condensation·.ä In Freudâs dream work, our latent dreams ÷ things we ãknowä subconsciously, such as a history of sexual abuse, are compressed into more compact narratives or displaced to imagery not explicitly linked to actual events. These processes create the manifest dream; the dream we actually dream. Outer Space and Dream Work and their imagery (nails, disembodied faces) are, in a sense, brief dreams condensed and displaced from The Entity. At times, Tscherkasskyâs films seem to mock the source material by mimicking the easy Freudian interpretation Hersheyâs analysts give her ãdreamsä (the face that is superimposed over Hersheyâs face during the Dream Work rape is her sonâs). More importantly, they condense into visual form The Entityâs underlying psychological narrative, the spiral into subjectivity in which Hersheyâs character is forced to be at once victim and perpetrator of violence against herself. The cure? According to Freud, hysteria, an exclusively female complaint, is cured by pleasure and by making manifest (i.e., visual) the latent trauma that causes it ÷ hence, in Dream Work, the womanâs ãorgasmä triggers the filmâs visual disintegration.
The film, however, is also named for American photographer Man Ray, whose ãRayographs,ä images produced when light is projected over opaque objects onto photographic paper, are the inspiration for Tscherkasskyâs contact-printing technique. And the films are truly homages: at one point, Tscherkassky directly quotes Faces, Man Rayâs photograph of two parallel solarized profiles, while the ticking clock throughout the film suggests the Surrealist obsession with gears, machines, automatism, and their linkage with the subconscious. Rayographs, like dreams, do not represent the objects they capture, but rather evoke tones or moods. Techniques such as negative printing or solarization (in which the photographic paper is exposed to light during the developing process, causing tones to reverse at the imageâs edges) defamiliarize objects÷Man Rayâs colleague and fellow Surrealist L‡szl— Moholy-Nagy wrote of the negative image: ãThe transposition of tones transposes the relationship [between a photograph and its subject].ä The properties of light, photochemistry, celluloid, and paper, then, become constants in an equation whose end point is something much less concrete: the subconscious, the psyche. Tscherkassky uses the same basic photographic processes to create films concerned as much with their own materiality as with the psychological processes they evoke ÷ a concept perhaps equally indebted to the filmsâ source: in The Entity, too, psychology and material presence are uneasily linked ÷ they require each other, even as they threaten to negate each other. Tscherkasskyâs cycles of progression and disintegration develop a similar logic÷they are visual, yet at odds with their own visibility, narrative, yet at odds with the process of narration.
Alice Lovejoy is Film Commentâs Associate Editor.
© 2002 by The Film Society of Linoln Center
Outer Space and Dream Work can be rented from Sixpack Film at www.sixpackfilm.com
