Screen Machine

Peter Tscherkassky: This is one of the things which I will explain during the masterclass. It’s a process which in my opinion could not be done with a computer. My example always is: I sit in the darkroom with my laser pointer, with the found footage in front of me, and I want to copy the face of Barbara Hershey [star of The Entity, from which Tscherkassky made two found-footage films, Outer Space and Dream Work]. So I sit there, and it’s nearly completely dark, with just a tiny bit of red light. And I know the face is in this spot. So I copy it, and then move on to the next frame, and I vaguely remember where it was, so I start looking around. Where is it, where is it? Ah, here. — So, I could never program a computer to go and look for Barbara Hershey’s face — but not immediately, to look around for it. This is one of the many effects, so to speak, where the manual process, the hand-crafted aspect, deeply informs what the film looks like. If you were to do that with a computer, it would look like an imitation of something, or I don’t know… I’m quite sure it would have its own beauty, but it would look completely different from what I’m doing. Besides, by that time [by the time I've found the section of the frame where Barbara Hershey's face appears], I’ve created three scratches. You spend months and months with the footage, with the films, and you don’t even start working until the material starts talking to you, asks you for something. And it’s constantly talking to you while you’re looking at it, for months. So, like in Outer Space, the sequence with the sprocket holes. This was something that came up just by chance. One day, by mistake, I copied one of the sprocket holes. So, OK, why not do it on purpose? And what happens if I lift it up, and what happens if I change the angle? There’s a huge amount of chance involved, which also could not be done with a computer. Of course you can put some chance effects inside the computer, but still it would be something completely different.

If nothing else, this year’s list confirms that we at Screen Machine are big Jesse Eisenberg fans (but then who isn’t?). It perhaps shows other continuities from our 2009 list, indicating some of the approaches and prejudices we have as film critics and spectators. We hope that the pieces we’ve written on each of the twenty films that appear here are of greater use and interest to readers than the mock-suspense of learning what finishes in which position. Returning to these films now allows us to say things about them that we couldn’t when they first appeared, and we think that these reflective pieces on the films of 2010 will offer plenty to discuss as we begin the new year.