Diana Bulzan

Peter Tscherkassky’s »Outer Space« plays on the manipulation of film footage in order to mark the continuity between the filmic medium as materiality and its representational counterpart. As such, the manufacture of the film becomes inscribed in the image as cuts, tears and shadows, as an incessant invasion of the frame by its invisible exterior or by what it cannot represent. Consequentially, the image is torn and distorted, and the inscription of reality becomes sublimated in a spectral gaze that haunts and attacks the central figure of the woman. By following this line of thought, the cinematic space opened by »Outer Space« will be described as a place of encounter between film as materiality, the image as representation and the inscription of the gaze. Moreover, as the focal point of this encounter is located in the figure of the woman, the inscription of the cinematic apparatus within the image reveals an underlying mechanism of desire around which both the cinematic apparatus and representation are structured. Thus, the following presentation will attempt to grasp each of the constituent elements and to use Tscherkassky’s film as a descriptive means for the elaboration of their intrinsic connection.

Diana Cristina Bulzan (1991) is a PhD Candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and is currently working on a thesis on feminism and subversive artistic representations of the female body. She has recently received a MA in Philosophy from the University Babeş-Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca, Romania with a thesis on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema. Her previous work includes research into experimental film and phenomenology of perception.