The Entity

The Entity

Main Articles

TSCHERKASSKY, ROBINSON, OREILLY: THREE PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIUM AND ITS MEANINGS

By Alejandro Bachmann and Daniel Fitzpatrick

Three domestic scenes tie together three seemingly diverse films. In the first, from Peter Tscherkassky’s 1999 found-footage masterpiece Outer Space, a woman (Barbara Hershey) walks alone, we see her entering a building, presumably her home. In the second, Michael Robinson’s Light is Waiting (2007), two sisters argue (in footage pulled from an episode of the US sitcom Full House), they are discussing what to watch, the evening news or the Top 40 countdown. In both instances, both scenes, these characters will encounter and be impacted upon by external forces, the security of their diegetic worlds invaded by non-diegetic elements usually kept under wraps. In both of these cases, we witness a striking and disturbing folding in of inner and outer space and, in each case, we are brought face to face with the nature of a medium while simultaneously experiencing its undoing, its destructive collapse.

READ MORE »