Dream Work (2001) User Reviews

Smashing the Atoms

[chaos-rampant · 31 January 2009]

Peter Tscherkassky is an Austrian avant-garde filmmaker who works exclusively with found footage. All of his work is done with film and heavily edited in the darkroom, rather than relying on technological modes. This is the third short film in his Cinemascope trilogy and is in many ways similar to the previous entry, Outer Space. A woman walking across a carpet, combing her hair, a man enters, grimacing faces superimposed, a woman smiling. At some point Tscherkassky's hands appear cutting up the film in the optical printer. A monochromatic canvas where images with their sense of equilibrium damaged and beyond repair attempt to re-align with their other selves. The closest comparison capturing the same sense of disjointed, jarring mayhem are glitch artist Kid606 with his cutups and sampling (minus the pop sensibilities), the noise of Merzbow or the hydraulic electronic grind of James Plotkin's Atomsmasher.

Nightmare work

[Horst_In_Translation · 2/10 · 28 July 2016]

"Dream Work" is a 10-minute short film by Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky. It is from 2002, so almost 15 years old and one of his more recent works. The title already tells us that a woman's dream plays a major role in this little movie. But as vivid as it may feel to her, as uninteresting does it feel to me as a member of the audience. It is an experimental work yes and I am biased because this is far from my favorite genre, but even then I expect more than this. It was absolutely impossible to understand what was going on. I ended up not caring for the girl or for her story at all. Luckily this is a pretty short film as I already wrote, like most works by Tscherkassky. Gonna take a look at these soon, but what I saw here left me really not curious at all. Major thumbs-down for this black-and-white film.