Outer Space

In a 2017 interview with Desistfilm, Peter Tscherkassky spoke about how footage from L'Emprise (1982) ended up as the basis for this film: "It's a funny story. At that time, in my personal 'pre-internet' era of the early nineties, my best friend, Martin Arnold, was teaching in the United States. And he owed me something because I had lent him twenty or thirty movie trailers to study. He was supposed to give them back to me. But when he moved into a new apartment, he forgot my trailers in the cellar of his old flat, they were all gone and lost forever. So, he owed me something. In the United States he had this film magazine called 'Big Reel', in which a dealer had placed an ad for film prints. I had already been thinking about this concept of doing something with CinemaScope. It was based on the idea that if you could project the full CinemaScope film strip, not just the image, but the full strip itself, you would see perforation holes and the soundtrack. And this would be seen on the edges of the screen, which means on that part of the screen which normally is only illuminated by CinemaScope films. So the outer space of the film strip would all of a sudden be seen. This conceptual idea inspired me to make a film using the filmic material as the main actor, represented mainly by the sound strip of the optical soundtrack, the perforation holes, and the celluloid itself. So, Martin read all the films available in 'Big Reel' to my telephone's answering machine. I looked all the titles up to see which of them were shot in CinemaScope, and I read short descriptions of their content. The Entity was not just in CinemaScope, it was also very cheap - only 50 dollars - plus the description read: 'An invisible ghost haunts and rapes a woman'. Well for 50 dollars I thought to myself, 'Let's give it a try!' I thought I could try to replace the ghost of the original with the film material itself. And when I saw the film I knew, 'This is it, bingo!' It was exactly what I needed. I started working on Outer Space and immediately found many images which would not fit into Outer Space, but could make up another film, which then became Dream Work (2001). So, that's the story. It was pure chance, really. And great luck!"

Edited from L'Emprise (1982)