Tscherkassky was expected by the Austrian public like a Hollywood celebrity. He made a date to the festival with great expectations, because if someone can influence the Austrian film, beyond the large Firtz Lang, Billy Wilder and Michael Haneke, it is Peter Tscherkassky. He is, without exaggeration, one of the main references of the found footage in the world.

The retrospective of the author brought his greatest works as a premise like Manufraktur (1985), Happy-End (1996), Outer Space (1999), Dream Work (2001), Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), Nocturne (2006) and a special appearance by one of his most recent works Coming Attractions (2010).

Considering that Tscherkassky works with found footage, the author forces the viewer to meditate of the traditional concept of cinema and cinematographic narrative. Showing that the film does not stop there, that within a story there may be another story, that there is a special value of preserving moments in motion pictures, and none of those moments can be taken lightly. Everything has a meaning, or rather can be given many ways to make sense.

It is said that the best word to describe what the filmmakers like Tschercassky do on images is an "operation", because an operation is an action during which somebody opens and revises a body to alter, add or remove something. You touch it, leave it scarred, or with a prosthesis, or graft, but you never leave it the same as it was before the operation (Sergio Wolf, 2011).

In that sense one can say that it starts from an object with its own life: a movie, a documentary, a reportage or a simple family video, then "operate it" and change its function, its structure and therefore its story.

The works of this Austrian filmmaker are a clear example of these ideas: if a conventional film is the assembly of cinematic elements that gives the diegesis, in the found footage we see a montage over montage, a feast of senses that revives the cinema. Found footage approaches the images like to an undiscovered phenomenon, because not everything is counted, and that which is already counted can be revaluated and rediscovered.

If well Peter Tscherkassky works in a darkroom on the celluloid, the found footage also performs well on video, and that’s the richness of this activity. What can be discovered in first hand at the Diagonale festival is that we must give the benefit of the doubt to every image, because we do not know if behind of what we see in any format can be hidden a masterpiece. Tscherkassky lives in a constant search of images, in the search of ways by which we all must get through once.

By Carlos Fidel Intriago