Directed by: Peter Tscherkassky.
One
of the reasons I have been delving into so many shorts lately is because there
are things you can do in a short film that you simply cannot do as a feature. A
feature length Outer Space would be both unnecessary and unwatchable. But at
just 10 minutes long, what director Peter Tscherkassky has done is disturbing,
hypnotizing and extremely unsettling.
What
Tscherkassky does is take Sidney J. Furie’s all but forgotten horror film The
Entity (1982) – which I haven’t seen, and based on what I’ve read, feel no need
to see – and edits it until its central plot – that of Barbara Hershey being
repeatedly raped by an unseen entity or demon in her house – and completely
obscures it. If you didn’t know what the original movie was about, you would
not be able to tell from this short.
The
film is a masterpiece of editing. The screen flashes – people with epilepsy
probably shouldn’t watch the film – as we see a lonely house on a hill. The
soundtrack is obscured – no real dialogue or music or identifiable sounds
really come through. The images have been turned black and white. The house on
the hill seems abandoned, lonely and above all extremely creepy. We will
eventually flash inside that house, and see Barbara Hershey, terrified of
someone or something in the house. But what? We see no one in the 10 minute
film except for Hershey. What emerges then is a portrait of madness. Hershey is
not really haunted by a real demon – we certainly do not see one – but rather by
her own interior demons. The interior of the house seemingly transforms before
Hershey’s eyes, as she grows increasingly terrorized.
I
have seen the movie compared to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), about the
gorgeous Catherine Deneueve going mad inside her apartment because of her
sexual repression, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). Both comparisons
are apt, because like the Hershey who emerges in Outer Space, the main
characters are driven mad not by some external force, but by the demons that
haunt their minds. But Outer Space is cut down to the bare essentials – the
entire movie like the finale of Mulholland Drive, when Diane (Naomi Watts) can
longer handle what has happened in her mind, and finally flips out.
The
film is essentially made to play like an intense nightmare – hence the harsh,
unrelenting sound, the constant flashing screen, the house that seems to change
from one moment to the next. It becomes impossible to orient yourself with what
is going on, because Tscherkassky continually changes what it is we see.
Outer
Space does not function like a normal movie, and as such, will probably
frustrate most viewers. No matter, you know if you’re the type of person who
wants to see an experimental short film like this, or if you’re not. Many
times, movies like this frustrate me – Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) is
an example of another movie re-edited from a nearly forgotten film to tell a
completely different story in short form, and I found that film to be dull and
pointless (many disagree with me). But Outer Space held me in rapt attention
for its 10 minutes – and truly got under my skin as well, in a way that most
horror films don’t anymore, because I am so attuned to their rhythms, that I am
getting harder and harder actually scare. But because Outer Space doesn’t play
by the same rules, it works remarkably well. Normally, I don’t much like films
like Outer Space – but this one is a true masterwork of its kind.
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