From Sound to Image: Toward an Aesthetic of Saturation in Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space

From Sound to Image: Toward an Aesthetic of Saturation in Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space Javier Elipe Gimeno[0000-0002-0358-385x] , Isabel Castro[0009-0009-6706-976X] and Charles Paiva Santana[0000-0002-2202-39384] Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, PRISM, Marseille, France Abstract: This article examines Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space (1999) from the perspective of audiovisual composition, focusing on the vertical structuring of image and sound. Constructed from found footage from The Entity (1982), the film uses analogue techniques such as laser image transfer and camera obscura to generate a dense, multi-layered montage. The soundtrack, created by copying the visual images onto the audio track, produces a saturated sonic texture that reflects the visual distortions. Drawing on early film theories - in particular Eisenstein's concept of vertical montage and Gance's polyvision - the paper explores how musical concepts such as harmony and polyphony can be used as analytical tools to understand film structure. The interplay between harmonicity and inharmonicity, both visual and aural, produces a dynamic tension that culminates in a perceptual cadence. This interdisciplinary approach, which links musicology and film studies, proposes Outer Space as a model of intermodal writing, where meaning emerges from the convergence of sensory modalities. Keywords: Experimental cinema, sound composition, montage, found footage 1. Introduction In recent decades, some of the most compelling experimental works in contemporary art have emerged from cross-disciplinary practices where multimodality, intertextuality, and collaboration between artists across distinct media—film, music, visual art—play a central role. Within this context, the Austrian experimental film scene, and in particular the work of Peter Tscherkassky, stands out as a site of radical innovation. At a time when mainstream cinema became increasingly digital, industrialized, and dematerialized, Tscherkassky and his peers returned with striking insistence to the material basis of film itself. Embracing analog film not only as a medium but as a physical substance to be manipulated, Tscherkassky’s approach—working with found footage, a camera obscura, and laser-based optical printing—recalls the artisanal ethos of early experimental cinema and photography, from Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling to Man Ray and Norman McLaren. Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on CMMR, London, UK, Nov. 3-7, 2025 848 2 J. Elipe Gimeno, I. Castro and Ch. Paiva Santana However, unlike those pioneers who often created images directly onto film, Tscherkassky does not produce original footage. Instead, he recycles fragments of existing films, particularly from Hollywood, in a practice that evokes the musique concrète tradition of Pierre Schaeffer, who constructed sonic works by reworking recorded “found” sounds rather than composing ex nihilo. This analogy with music is not incidental: in Tscherkassky’s films, sound seems to play an almost equally structural role as image. The highly saturated and textural audiovisual surfaces of his work follow an intricate, virtuosic logic that invites close analysis. What accounts for the consistency and coherence of these works? How can we understand the complex interplay between sound and image that gives his films their unique temporal and sensorial tension? While Tscherkassky’s films have been discussed extensively in the literature before [1], little attention has been given to the interplay between sound and image in his work, particularly through frameworks that draw on music theory and audiovisual composition. Few studies have examined how musical concepts such as harmony and polyphony might inform an understanding of his filmic strategies. This article focuses on Outer Space (1999), the first film in Tscherkassky’s CinemaScope trilogy. Our goal is to analyze the film’s intermodal structure through a comparative lens, shedding new light on the links between musical and cinematic montage. The aesthetics of Outer Space, and its montage in particular, have been analyzed in various essays. In this article, we aim to further develop the discussion by exploring the vertical structuring of sound and image in Outer Space, emphasizing its polyphonic and multilayered montage. The interdisciplinary framework of this article, co-authored by researchers and artists in both musicology and cinema studies—encourages and aims to deepen the intersection between visual montage, understood in its vertical dimension, and sound composition. Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on CMMR, London, UK, Nov. 3-7, 2025 849 From Sound to Image 3 2. On Outer Space, Vertical Montage, and Polyphony Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999) is an Austrian experimental found footage film, integrating the filmmaker’s CinemaScope trilogy [2]. Found footage is a filmmaking practice that involves recycling material from pre-existing films. In this case, Tscherkassky constructs Outer Space using footage from the Hollywood horror film The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1982) [3]. As Tchekarssky himself elucidates: “Found footage elevates the very processes of filmic representation to the status of material for artistic representation: it sets aside the preexisting meanings embedded in the images and constructs a meta-level from which latent and new meanings become knowable.” [4] To realize Outer Space, Tscherkassky copied selected frames from The Entity onto 35mm virgin film using a camera obscura. This process involved various laser devices of different sizes and shapes, enabling diverse methods of transferring the photograms [5]. The resulting montage emphasizes scenes of aggression, transforming them through repetition and visual manipulation to produce a heightened sensory experience. For the creation of the original soundtrack, Tscherkassky used a similar technique, but applied it to sound. For this, he copied some fragments of the sound part of the original film onto the virgin film [6]. This sound composition was therefore composed of residual sounds from the original film (The Entity), caused by copying parts of the image into the sound part of the virgin film. This process causes a certain type of saturated sounds. This soundtrack creates a perfect balance between moments of emptiness and moments of visual sound saturation of the film. The articulation between the images and the film is organized in an organic way, thanks to the use of common structures between the sound and the visual part (use of images as waveforms, use of images as a musical motif, etc.). You can see an example of such use in the diagram below: Fig. 1. Exemple showing how Peter Tscherkassky made the sound in Outer Space (1999). In its visual dimension, Outer Space is largely constructed through various forms of image superposition, generating unstable, dynamic compositions in constant flux. While in its horizontality the montage works with succession, in its verticality it works with simultaneity, that is, the co-presence of elements. It is interesting to note that, when we look at the first theories of cinematic montage, the ideas of verticality Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on CMMR, London, UK, Nov. 3-7, 2025 850 4 J. Elipe Gimeno, I. Castro and Ch. Paiva Santana and simultaneity recur frequently in analogies drawn from musical vocabulary. Let’s look, for instance, at the Soviet theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's definition of “vertical montage”, formulated in the late 1930s [7]. In his early theoretical writings on the subject, Eisenstein evokes the image of a musical score to illustrate how the vertical structure—rather than the horizontal sequence—connects all elements within a unified temporal framework. Analogous to the vertical relations between musical notes and orchestral instruments in a score, Eisenstein introduces the notion of vertical montage in cinema. He explains: In order to diagram what takes place in vertical montage, we may visualize it as two lines, keeping in mind that each of these lines represents a whole complex of a many-voiced scoring. [...] Diagram 2 reveals the new "vertical" factor of intercorrespondence, which arises the moment that the pieces of the sound-picture montage are connected. From the viewpoint of montage structure, we no longer have a simple horizontal succession of pictures, but now a new "super-structure" is erected vertically over the horizontal picture structure. (...) Pieces of sound do not fit into the picture pieces in sequential order, but in simultaneous order. [8] Fig. 3. Eisenstein’s diagram in “Synchronization of senses”. In : The Film Sens. Meridian Books, New York (1957), p. 79. Thus, the conceptual foundation of vertical montage lies in the idea that audio-visual montage should not be limited to the linear juxtaposition of its horizontal axis—its sequential and narrative flow—but must also incorporate a vertical axis that operates through simultaneity. Eisenstein repeatedly invokes the metaphor of “orchestration” and argues for the necessity of creating a “polyphonic structure made up of many separate lines” [9], both visual and sonic. Notably, he cites the technique of image superimposition (double exposure), already present in silent cinema, as an instance of this vertical principle in action. French avant-garde filmmaker Abel Gance employs a comparable musical vocabulary when describing his cinematic experiments with triptychs, both in Napoléon (1927) and later in his Proterama dispositif (1950). Gance develops the concept of polyvision, referring to it as a form of visual polyphony that enables spectators to “see simultaneously the melodic line of the subject (central screen) and its orchestration (lateral screens).” He writes: I cannot stress enough that POLYVISION corresponds to what POLYPHONY once was. In the 14th century, polyphony transformed the art of music (...) And through cautious yet bold experimentation, it became possible to interweave one sound with another, then two, then three, until eventually the four-voice organum emerged. Thus Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on CMMR, London, UK, Nov. 3-7, 2025 851 From Sound to Image 5 was born counterpoint, and with it, orchestration, which triumphantly opened new doors for music. Through the play of simultaneous associations, Polyvision will operate in the same way. [10] Analogies between cinematic montage and musical terms such as polyphony, orchestration, and harmony are current in the first half of the 20th century but often imprecise, as seen in the writings of Eisenstein or Gance. These notions are frequently used interchangeably as modes of simultaneity, and this very looseness is one reason such comparisons have become dated and are rarely revisited in contemporary film studies. Yet, they seem relevant for understanding the montage strategies in Peter Tscherkassky’s film, as they address crucial aspects of its visual and sound composition and the relationship between them. Drawing primarily on the notions of polyphony and harmony, the following analysis focuses on Outer Space, exploring their relevance as analytical tools—particularly in how the film’s montage fosters a densification, or saturation, of visual and sound information. This often results in a decentering of the spectator’s gaze, encouraging a diffuse mode of reception. 3. Sound and image compositions The sound composition of Outer Space, generated by copying the frames of the original film into the sound part of the virgin film, may seem random, because the sound result is less controllable than the visual result. But this possible randomness is apparent, as the sound resulting from this manipulation is articulated in a common gesturality with the images. The visual part of the film is combined in an alternation of intelligible sequences, with progressive transitions of visual distortion up to totally abstract sequences. In that case, we have a graduation of visual situations (from a vertical point of view) that can be ordered as a range of more or less saturated elements, or if we make an analogy with music, with different levels of harmonicity: more harmonic, if we are talking about an image with a certain level of intelligibility, or more inharmonic, if we are talking about images with more saturation, or with less recognisable visual elements. In the case of Outer Space, we could, for example, order this range of harmonicity/inharmonicity of images in the following way: 1,- White or black image without any external element. 2.- Image of the original film without interferences. 3.- Image of the original film with variations in luminosity. 4.- Image of the original film with punctual interferences of foreign elements (peripheral elements of the film, waveforms, etc.) 5.- Unaltered original sequence of the original film with superimposition of another unaltered image of the original film. Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on CMMR, London, UK, Nov. 3-7, 2025 852 6 J. Elipe Gimeno, I. Castro and Ch. Paiva Santana 6.- Unaltered image with redoubling. 7.- Image of the original film with spot interferences that lighten some parts of the image . 8.- Images of the original film with large superimposition of foreign elements (peripheral elements of the film, waveforms, etc.). 9.- Images with high saturation content that simultaneously present several of the procedures described above. Apart from arranging the superimposition of elements in the image according to a concept of hamonicity, another analogy with musical language also helps us to analyse the nature and composition of these images: the concept of polyphony. The visual composition, in addition to varying along a spectrum of harmonicity and inharmonicity, intangibility and abstraction, can produce a polyphonic (or “polyvisual,” in Gance’s terms) effect. This occurs when the collage effect between images—through techniques 4 or 5 listed above—is perceptible. At certain moments, there is a separation of the visual elements (“voices”) sharing the space of the screen. Even if only briefly, they coexist while still being perceived individually, as illustrated in the frame below (Fig. 4). Fig. 4. Photogram of unaltered original sequence of the original film with superimposition of other unaltered images of the original film, as an example of visual polyphony. The technique of illuminating certain spots of the image while leaving others in darkness can also be understood as a form of fragmentation or separation of visual elements. By disrupting the visual continuity of space, a degree of autonomy is granted to individual parts, which can be interpreted as another way of introducing a form of polyphony (Fig 5). Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on CMMR, London, UK, Nov. 3-7, 2025 853 From Sound to Image 7 Fig. 5. Film frame of image of the original film with spot interferences that lighten some parts of the image. Through Tscherkassky’s polyphonic montage, different zones of the screen are thus constantly being activated and deactivated, both simultaneously and sequentially, engaging not only verticality but also, we might say, a diagonal dimension of visual montage. The visual compositions are ephemeral, in constant motion, never fixed in time, what Blümlinger aptly describes as “cinematic indeterminacy” [11]. This indeterminacy, however, varies in terms of harmonicity and polyphony. Both concepts alternate in the film, creating a series of more or less intelligible situations. As this process is mutually constructed (as explained in the previous point), the visual and sound planes finally converge in a common gestuality. In this way, the articulation of the concepts of hamonicity with those of polyphony creates a series of relations where the sound plane behaves as an extension of the convergence of these ‘musical’ concepts on the visual plane: harmony and polyphony. On the purely sonic level, we also have a correspondence of more or less altered sounds (in relation to the original film) in a relatively similar way to the treatment of the images. From a purely sonorous point of view, we will find in this film the following types of sound, which we can also classify according to concepts of harmonicity (superposition and intelligibility of sounds) and polyphony: 1.- Slight noise coming from the film editing. 2.- Excerpts from the original film's soundtrack. 3.- Sound sequence (in accordance with the images) with a certain noise from the montage of the film. 4.- Sound saturation coming from the addition of images in the sound part. 5.- Looped repetition of the original soundtrack. 6.- Superimposition of several layers of sounds from the original film. 7.- Loud noise coming from the editing of the film. 8.- Superimposition of several layers of sounds from the original film distorted by a loop of silences. 9.- Numerical noise of square wave type. Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on CMMR, London, UK, Nov. 3-7, 2025 854 8 J. Elipe Gimeno, I. Castro and Ch. Paiva Santana A sound resultant that converges in a situation analogous to the images (but not in an illustrative or synchronised way) leads us therefore to one of intermodal writing, where the visual realisation equally creates the sound one, and where concepts such as saturation or vibration have a sound, visual and physical application. Let us now look at an analytical representation of these concepts, and how they alternate with each other in a common construction: Visual range of harmonicity Images Sound range of harmonicity Polyphony 1 White or black image without any external element. Slight noise coming from the film editing. Not 2 Image of the original film without interferences. Excerpts from the original film's soundtrack. Not 3 Image of the original film with variations in luminosity. Sound sequence (in accordance with the images) with a certain noise from the montage of the film. Not 4 Image of the original film with punctual interferences of film elements Sound saturation coming from the addition of images in the sound part. Yes 5 Unaltered sequence of the original film with superimposition of another unaltered image of the original film. Looped repetition of the original soundtrack. Yes 6 Unaltered image with redoubling. Superimposition of several layers of sounds from the original film. Not 7 Image of the original film with spot interferences that lighten some parts of the image. Loud noise coming from the editing of the film. Yes Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on CMMR, London, UK, Nov. 3-7, 2025 855 From Sound to Image 9 8 Images of the original film with large superimposition of film elements. Numerical noise of square wave type. Yes 9 Images with high saturation simultaneously present several of the procedures described above. Superimposition of several layers of sounds from the original film distorted by a loop of silences. Yes Table 1. Equivalence between harmonicity range in visual and sound parts in Outer Space (1999). The table above shows the equivalence between the visual and sound planes, ordered according to an index of sound or visual harmonicity, with respect to a vertical analysis of sound and visual information. This list of equivalences is arranged in order of increasing harmonicity, with rank 1 being the most ‘harmonic’ according to this concept of verticality, and rank 9 the most inharmonic. In this table, we can also see how the concept of polyphony is interspersed between the different levels of harmonicity. This scale of correspondence between visual and sound harmonicities is finally ordered in the film, in the form of a tension curve, thus leading to a progression from an immersive point of view. In the following example, we can see how the frames in the above picture are temporally ordered during the first 5 minutes of the film. In this example, we can see how this curve of inharmonicity is ordered until the first half of the film, and how this curve decays at the end of this curve, creating a kind of "cadence": Fig. 3. Graph showing how the different degrees of harmonicity are ordered in the film. This cadence, emerging from the interplay between visual and sound inharmonicity, functions not only as a structural closure but also as a perceptual resolution for the viewer. The gradual accumulation and subsequent release of Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on CMMR, London, UK, Nov. 3-7, 2025 856