still from Train Again (Peter Tscherkassky, AT 2021)

Train Again: Peter Tscherkassky meets the Lumière Brothers

Eye on Art: Train Again: Peter Tscherkassky meets the Lumière Brothers

Early film history, avantgarde film and advertising. In a darkened room, Peter Tscherkassky brings these three primal elements together in a hallucinogenic film experience. A show prompted by Eye obtaining Train Again for its collection, Tscherkassky’s phantom ride through the engine room of the ‘seventh art’.

Train Again by lauded Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky is a new addition to Eye’s collection. Eye follows his oeuvre closely, as Tscherkassky’s loving, critical view of the history of film perfectly complements Eye’s mission to research the present, past and future of film in an innovative way.

With an introduction by Mark-Paul Meyer (senior curator Eye) and Anna Abrahams (Eye on Art programmer).

Programme

Train Again (2021, 20')
Ever since their very earliest days, cinema and trains have been inextricably connected as the new engine rooms of bewilderment and disorientation. Audiences believed they were taking their lives in their hands exposing themselves to these electric shadows, led by the Lumière brothers who in 1895 marked the arrival of animated photography on the platform of the train station at La Ciotat.

Peter Tscherkassky's rollercoaster ride through a frame-by-frame landscape of thrilling cinema starts with some hectic action, and a baton being passed on: horse-drawn coaches complete one last time against the new iron horse; footage of the coaches and drivers is intercut at dizzying speed with that of the train.
L'arrivée (1998, 3')
A film inspired by the avant-garde’s fascination with formal abstraction and materiality. Although L'arrivée undergoes a process of deconstruction, this is also an ode to the power of cinema, which uses its control over rhythm – and in this film especially time – to expose movement and stories of the violence inherent to both uprising and encirclement.
Motion Picture (La sortie des ouvrier de l'usine Lumiére á Lyon) (1984, 3')
In a darkened room, 50 strips of unilluminated 16mm film are attached to the wall, on a surface measuring 50x80cm. Onto this rough material, a few images are projected, taken from the Lumière brothers’ first film, La sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon (1895). The result takes the source material back to its most basic elements, to light and dark – in so doing releasing it from all figurative meaning.
Coming Attractions (2010, 25')
The title refers both to advertising films and to an early form of cinema, the 'cinema of attractions'. Together with avant-garde film, these form the basis for 11 chapters in which Peter Tscherkassky investigates the changing relationships between these three moving-image worlds. This cinematographic cross-section makes up a light, playful visual poem.

This is part of

Eye on Art

Production year

2023

Length

72 min.

Event language

English

Country

Part of

Eye on Art

Eye on Art is a programme on the intersection between film and other arts. Eye on Art keeps up with current events, with presentations on contemporary artists and programmes that coincide with important exhibitions, manifestations and Eye activities.

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