Scene from the film Coming Attractions
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Coming Attractions

Direction
Year 
2010
Country
  • Austria
Duration
25min 

A negative image of a man's eyes in a car's rearview mirror. The countershot shows a smiling woman, and her wholly unambiguous facial expressions call our attention to the image's left-hand side, where film clips take shape in a flickering split screen. They show models, cups and various types of vehicles, which are then worked over thoroughly in the next 25 minutes: Coming Attractions. The title refers to both the nature of advertising films and early cinema, the 'cinema of attractions.' The initial visual contact juxtaposes the two genres through editing, and together with avant-garde film they represent the basic troika for 11 chapters in which Peter Tscherkassky examines the varying relationships between these three worlds of moving images. His film, a look at cinematic history through the rearview mirror, has been enriched with references in the carefully worded headings, to painting, music and film theory, in the form of wordplay. At the same time, what is being shown is fairly obvious. Using screen tests for commercials that were not meant to be preserved, Tscherkassky, the master of found footage, composed Coming Attractions in minute darkroom work. He adopted a variety of approaches in the individual chapters and, understandably, reveled in the absurd character of his raw material. Associations and cross connections are created, some of them mischievous and others with a deeper meaning: from the 'Ballet monotonique' of the daily grind at work, inspired by Léger, and actresses in advertising films who are doomed to mechanically repeat the same actions again and again, to the downright surreal scene of a model with an inflatable hood drier and a saxophone, not to forget a farewell scene in which two seemingly bewildered Pasolini actors encounter a sheepishly grinning tractor driver from a dumpling-mix commercial. This amusing cinematic cross-section presented as a cryptic visual poem, or poem of visuals, showing (un)conscious missteps is amusing, lighthearted and playful.

Details

  • Original title
    Coming Attractions
  • Direction
  • Screenplay
    Peter Tscherkassky
  • Editing
    Peter Tscherkassky, Eve Heller
  • Sound
    Dirk Schaefer
  • Duration
    25 min (16-30 min.)
  • Year
    2010
  • Country
    • Austria
  • Production
  • Distribution
  • Festivals
    • Brighton - Cinecity Film Festival 2010
    • Cork - Int. Film Festival 2010
    • Gijon - International Film Festival 2010
    • Leeds - Int. FilmFestival 2010
    • London - BFI International Film Festival 2010
    • Madrid - Semana de Cine Experimental 2010
    • Mar del Plata - Int. Film Festival 2010
    • Montréal - Festival du Nouveau Cinéma 2010
    • New York - Film Festival 2010
    • Rio de Janeiro - Mostra Curta de Cinema 2010
    • Thessaloniki - International Film Festival 2010
    • Toronto - Int. Film Festival / Wavlenghts 2010
    • Valdivia Int. Film Festival 2010
    • Venezia - Mostra Internazionale d`Arte Cinematografica - Concorso Orizzonti 2010
    • Viennale - Vienna Int. Film Festival 2010
    • Zagreb - 25fps Film & Video Festival 2010
    • Ankara - Festival on Wheels 2011
    • Ankara - Int. Film Festival 2011
    • Barcelona - L’ALTERNATIVA - II Mostra Internacional de Cinema Alternatiu 2011
    • Bergamo - Cortopotere Int. Film Festival 2011
    • Diagonale, Festival des Österreichischen Films 2011
    • Grimstadt - Kortfilmfestivalen 2011
    • Hong Kong - Int. Film Festival 2011
    • Kaunas Int. Film Festival 2011
    • Paris - Cinéma du Réel 2011
    • Rotterdam - Int. Filmfestival 2011
    • San Francisco - Golden Gate Award Int. Film Festival 2011
    • Seoul - EXis (Experimental Film- & Videofestival) 2011
    • Seoul - Jeonju International Film Festival 2011
    • Split - Festival of New Film and Video 2011
    • Tokyo - Image Forum Festival 2011
    • Uppsala - Int. Short Film Festival 2011
    • Utrecht - Impakt Festival 2011
    • Vila do Conde - Festival Internacional de Curtas-Metragens 2011
    • Vilnius - Tindirindis International Animated Film Festival 2011
    • Wien - VIS Vienna Independent Shorts 2011
    • Wroclaw - WRO-International Media Art Biennale 2011
    • Belgrade - Alternative Film/Video Festival 2012
    • Bradford - International Film Festival 2013
    • Bukarest - BIFF Int Experimental Film Festival 2014
    • Sevilla - Festival del Cine Europeo 2014
  • Awards
    • ORIZZONTI AWARD Shorts. Venezia - Mostra Internazionale d`Arte Cinematografica - Concorso Orizzonti 2010

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