Peter Tscherkassky

"With more than 20 films since 1979, Peter Tscherkassky is one of Austria's most productive filmmakers. What is remarkable, however, is not so much the quantity as the consistent quality of his work. Tscherkassky never allows himself to fall back on certainties, rather, with each film, he is sizing up new territory. Tscherkassky's films are exceptional because he knows how to pair his strict concepts and his consistent exploration of a subject with a visual richness, revealing new, surprising facets of sensuality with every film he makes."
- Alexander Horwath

"A confrontation with the codes of narrative-representational cinema is one of Peter Tscherkassky's constant concerns. If one attempts to distill a constant from his films, then this must surely be the oscillation between abstract and the concrete, between the dry and the sensual, which is the source of energy in of his work. The question of belly or brain is one which Tscherkassky stopped asking long ago - for ultimately sobriety is the route to ecstasy."
- Gabriele Jutz

Born in 1958 in Vienna, Austria. Lived in Berlin 1979-1984. Studied philosophy. Doctoral thesis: "Film as Art. Towards a Critical Aesthetics of Cinematography" (1985/1986). Founding member of Sixpack Film. Organized several international avant-garde film festivals in Vienna and film tours
abroad. Since 1984 numerous publications and lectures on the history and theory of avant-garde film. 1993 and 1994 artistic director of the annual Austrian film festival "Diagonale." Editor of the book "Peter Kubelka" (1995). Films since 1979. Recent book: Alexander Horwath, Michael
Loebenstein (Ed.), "Peter Tscherkassky" (germ./engl.; Vienna 2005).

Awards (for the complete works):
Film Promotion Award of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and Art 1989
Austrian National Award for the Art of Film 1996
Award of Appreciation for the Art of Film of the province of Lower Austria 2003
Special Award of Festival Internacional de Cine de Gijón 2008

http://www.tscherkassky.at