A collection of short experimental horror films, some well-known, some not.

Peter Tscherkassky's Coming Attractions is a sly, sartorial comedy that masterfully mines the relationship between early cinema and the avant-garde by way of fifties-era advertising. With references to Méliès, Lumières, Cocteau, Léger, Chomette and Persil laundry detergent, the film explores cinema’s subliminal possibilities using an impressive arsenal of techniques, like solarization, optical printing and multiple exposures. This ambitious 25-minute piece was inspired by film scholar Tom Gunning’s notion of a Cinema of Attractions which, according to Tscherkassky, “touches upon the exhibitionistic character of early film, the undaunted show and tell of its creative possibilities, and its direct addressing of the audience.” Describing his process for the French journal Trafic, he explained, “At some point it occurred to me that another residue of the Cinema of Attractions lies within the genre of advertising: Here we also often encounter a uniquely direct relation between actor, camera and audience. The impetus for Coming Attractions was to bring the three together: commercials, early cinema, and avant-garde film.” The found footage in Coming Attractions was rescued from a bankrupt advertising firm and gifted to Tscherkassky, who immediately saw its potential. “It came to about six hours of rushes from commercials, some of them so bad that they never were used,” he explained to me. “It was like a raw jewel waiting to be polished.” He produced the labor-intensive piece over the course of two years, all the while maintaining the sensible practice of not working in the darkroom during summertime.

Liebesfilm is an ironic attack on one of the durables of the Hollywood clichés - the film kiss. A short take of mouths approaching each other is shown 522 times. But the kiss never takes place, merely the speed of the movement is continually increased. This excessive repetition of the theme destroys the "happy clarity" that inhabits "the film kiss" myth.

Aderlaß is a youthful attempt to process the inheritance of the Vienna Actionists through the use of a super 8 camera. In front of the camera is a performance from Armin Schmickl Sebastiano (Peter Tcherkassky). A game with light and sound that explodes out of the calm into a delirium of movement and finally returns, after the "blood-letting", to rigidity. (Irene Judmayer)

The first of Peter Tscherkassky's Cinemascope trilogy of short films is a fragmented glimpse of images pulsating with chaotic rhythm as they fight white margins for room in his palette. Mirrored frames being split by white margin and trying to reassemble again like the poles of a magnet, a train approaching station and colliding with itself in white-hot blistering chaos.

On a weekend in June 1983, in what was deemed a “country outing,” an impressive number of Berlin-based artists went to a small German village to give the local residents a taste of Berlin’s avant-garde art scene. Back in Berlin, the footage was manipulated to produce an “experimental examination.”

In the darkroom, 50 unexposed film strips were laid across a surface, upon which a frame of La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière was projected to create a new kind of film…

An attempt to transform a Roman Western into a Greek tragedy.

18 years after Kurt Kren produced his third film 3/60 Bäume im Herbst [3/60 Trees in Autumn], he shot his masterpiece 37/78 Tree Again. 18 years after I created my third darkroom film L’Arrivée (an homage to the Lumière brothers and their 1895 L'Arrivée d'un train), I embarked on Train Again. This third film in my “Rushes Series” is an homage to Kurt Kren that simultaneously taps into a classic motif in film history. My darkroom ride took a few years, but we finally arrived: All aboard!

A young woman move towards a house that holds a potentially dangerous spirit that has been tormenting her. The woman tries to fight against the film itself as it starts to cause the world to collapse.

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

A propulsively jittering journey through the cinematic imaginary using glitchy found footage and jacked-up cyber sounds, Get Ready hits the highway hard and takes us with it. A car crash? An escape? This turbo-charged condensation of cinematic moods and tropes makes much of its tiny run-time.

A woman goes to bed, falls asleep, and begins to dream. This dream takes her to a landscape of light and shadow, evoked in a form only possible through classic cinematography. An homage to Man Ray, dedicated to the beginning of the European avant-garde film within the surrealist movement.