Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky 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. Tscherkassky not only presents beautiful and haunting images but also forces the audience to rethink the traditional conception of film and film narrative. After studying philosophy in Berlin and Vienna, he finished a doctoral thesis on aesthetics and avant-garde cinema. Over the course of his career, Tscherkassky has made some thirty films, including his ‘CinemaScope Trilogy’, with L’Arrivée (1998), Outer Space (1999), and Dreamwork (2001). These films have received over 50 awards, including the Golden Gate Award (San Francisco), the Oberhausen Grand Prize, and the Best Short Film Award at the Venice Film Festival.
Peter Tscherkassky
Peter Tscherkassky participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Peter Tscherkassky’s submission:
Thank you for doing this.
— Peter Tscherkassky| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meshes of the Afternoon | Alexander Hammid , Maya Deren | USA | 1946 | 14’ | ||
| Adebar | Peter Kubelka | Austria | 1957 | 2’ | ||
| Schwechater | Peter Kubelka | Austria | 1958 | 1’ | ||
| 6/64 Mama und Papa 6/64 Mom and Dad (An Otto Muehl Happening) | Kurt Kren | Austria | 1964 | 4’ | ||
| Castro Street | Bruce Baillie | USA | 1966 | 10’ | ||
| Runs Good | Pat O’Neill | USA | 1971 | 15’ | ||
| Remains to be Seen | Phil Solomon | USA | 1989 | 17’ | ||
| Singing in Oblivion | Eve Heller | Austria | 2021 | 13’ | ||
| passage à l’acte | Martin Arnold | Austria | 1993 | 12’ | ||
| Ballet mécanique | Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy | France | 1924 | 16’ | ||
