Outer Space
Outer Space
| 01 January 1999 (USA)
Outer Space Trailers

A premonition of a horror film, lurking danger: A house - at night, slightly tilted in the camera's view, eerily lit - surfaces from the pitch black, then sinks back into it again. A young woman begins to move slowly towards the building. She enters it. The film cuts crackle, the sound track grates, suppressed, smothered. Found footage from Hollywood forms the basis for the film. The figure who creeps through the images, who is thrown around by them and who attacks them is Barbara Hershey. Tscherkassky's dramatic frame by frame re-cycling, re-copying and new exposure of the material, folds the images and the rooms into each other. It removes the ground from under the viewer's feet and splits faces, like in a bad dream. From the off, from outer space, foreign bodies penetrate the images and cause the montage to become panic stricken. The outer edges of the film image, the empty perforations and the skeletons of the optical sound track rehearse an invasion...

Reviews
Stometer

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

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Platicsco

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

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ActuallyGlimmer

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

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Lela

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

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framptonhollis

"Outer Space" is a film that definitely lives up to its title, for it really is out of this world. As a matter of fact, if I were to name any film I have ever seen that most closely resembles what space aliens likely consume for entertainment on a daily basis, I would easily pick this film. It takes found horror movie footage, and uses wild experimental techniques to further warp and distort the visuals on screen, creating one of the most chilling and atmospheric horror movies I have ever seen.While not for every taste (or MOST tastes even), this film can easily be appreciated by those who have an interest in the more avant garde and dark sides of cinema.

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Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)

"Outer Space" is a 10-minute black-and--white short film written and directed by Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky 17 years ago. It stars Barbara Hershey briefly after her Oscar nomination and she is the only actress in here. IMDb lists this as a horror film, but if it really is such, then I wasn't scared for a second watching this. It is extremely experimental and I must say I really disliked it. The light effects were almost painful to watch. There is not only no convincing story in here, there is pretty much no story at all. Watching this one makes me really surprised how many awards it won and it also motivates me to stay pretty far away from Tscherkassky's other works. There may be a reason why he never tried making full feature films, even if his short works got great recognition. I do not recommend "Outer Space". Not at all. This little movie also looks way older than it actually is.

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Rodrigo Amaro

"Outer Space" is a short film directed by Peter Tscherkassky and in it we sort of see a horror film about a woman played by Barbara Hershey (archive footage taken from one of her films) fighting a blurry celluloid. Or at least, that's my view of this film, she's trapped in a defectuous film reel present in the plot and that is basically the whole film.The director impresses us with a unusual visual, a kaleidoscope of images and strange sounds where Hershey tries to do everything to get out. There are times when the images are so immersed in itself that creates a whole new cinematic experience, flashlights, the reel forms, noises and more noises, and for odd reasons it is a interesting thing. It doesn't make you bored but it also doesn't make you appalled; it's just a new thing and it's nice to watch it. It's unpretentious, but not that easy to follow or to feel really interested in it if you haven't seen different things in all types of films. In terms of horror it's not something to make you feel scared but it's made to get you confused, wondering what those hypnotic images are trying to say and trying to show.Do you enjoy new cinematic forms, new experiences? Go for it, it's amazing and there's a great technical quality (and I'm not sounding ironic despite the affected film reel). 8/10

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Polaris_DiB

A woman goes home under auspicious lighting, a vague feeling of voyeurism begins to ignite, and then the film itself begins to attack, split imagery and broken soundtrack igniting into shimmering violent energy and strobe-light intoxication. It could mean that the act of filming itself is a rendering or ripping away of surface of characters, that the instance of "shooting" someone can rupture them. It could be a comment on the impending death of film, as film itself is torn and scraped and pieced back together, eventually reviving itself but losing track of what it once was. It could be an exploration of "space" where the significant dissonance between the spectator and the events (especially during the more flashy scenes) creates a huge disruption of the ability to be sucked in.I don't know. What I do know is that this film is very uncomfortable and for a large part aggressive (something it promises to be, especially considering its placement in the "Experiments in Terror" DVD released by Other Cinema), and not something to be taken lightly.--PolarisDiB

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