Category: ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

Mermaid (Rusalka). Directed by Anna Melikyan. Central Partnership, 2007. 115 min/100 min (theatrical version in Russia), 35 MM.

As a result of a workshop held in Berlin in November 2008 we invited five critics and scholars to discuss Anna Melikyan’s film The Mermaid (Rusalka, 2007). The workshop was tied to an international research project at the Free University in Berlin. One of the underlying objectives of this project – entitled “Die nicht mehr neuen Menschen” or “The New Man No More” – was to historicize different concepts of the individual as they emerged in Russian film and … Read more

Polish New Wave, Kinoteka Film Festival 2009, Tate Modern, London, 3-5 April, 2009

As the title of this event implies, the Polish New Wave is by no means a straightforward pre-existing historical movement that can be precisely dated. In contrast to the FrenchNew Wave and the closer example – both geographically and politically – of the Czech New Wave, the Polish New Wave was never able to have a continuous, stable development but was rather evident in a number of individual cinematic projects occurring over an extended period of time, the contours, definition and limits of which are still … Read more

The Bug Trainer (Vabzdži? dresuotojas), directed by Donatas Ulvydas, Linas Augutis, Marek Skrobecki, and Rasa Miskinyte. (Lithuania-Poland-Japan-The Netherlands – Finland, 2008).

The Bug Trainer is a biopic which tells the story of the legendary Polish-Lithuanian animation artist Ladislas Starevich (aka. W?adys?aw Starewicz, 1882-1965). Today Starevich is known only to film historians, but in the first decades of the twentieth century, his pioneering work in stop-motion animation enjoyed a wide international success. “How does he manage to couch beetles?” exclaimed the enraptured spectators of his early shows, unable to believe that the insect stars they saw on screen were … Read more

Journal No. 1 – An Artist’s Impression. Directed by Hito Steyerl.  2007. Video: 21 min.

“Once upon a time there was a country…”  This sentence, borrowed from Dušan Kova?evi?’s novel of the same title and later adopted into Emir Kusturica’s film Underground, evokes a temporality that is tied to origins and to the kind of arkhè Jacques Derrida challenged as part of his undoing of the metaphysical relationship between being and its history in Western culture and thought. Steyerl’s short documentary questions the fairy tale perspective on Yugoslavia’s mythical origins and its relationship with time. The film tells of … Read more

From June 28th to July 5th 2008, the 22nd Bologna Film Festival Cinema Ritrovato, dedicated to rare and restored films, hosted a large retrospective of the legendary Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. “We make films, Kuleshov made cinematography,” once wrote Vsevolod Pudovkin, one of Kuleshov’s distinguished disciples. This phrase, reflecting Kuleshov’s contribution to Russian cinema, became the motto of the retrospective. The program of the show spanned the period from 1917 to 1943 and included all of Kuleshov’s most famous films, a number of surviving fragments of his works made at different stages in his career, an early editing experiment … Read more

Coal Dust (Ugol’naya Pyl’). Directed by Maria Miro (aka Maria Miroshnichenko). VGIK, Ostrov Studio, 2006. Video: 20 min, 35mm.

The twenty-minute documentary Coal Dust (Ugol’naya Pyl’) was shot by a young VGIK team in the Chelyabinsk area (located in the east of Ural Mountains) in 2005. After the shooting was completed in 2006, the director Maria Miro (Miroshnichenko) was honored at the “Window to Europe” festival in Vyborg in 2007 for the best debut. In the same year her film also won the Moscow student film festival “St. Anna” (“Svyataya Anna”) in the non fiction film … Read more

At the beginning of the The Ister, the camera makes a long take of the setting sun and the riverbed of the Danube. As the ship on which the camera is perched is overtaken by another, faster one, the ship gently sways in the wake of the other, and the gaze, captured by the camera, sways with it.

Thus, the beginning of the film sets up a divided frame of the division within that will carry throughout the filming: the interrupted single take shot, the thematic and rhetoric fluidity of the gaze that is cast on the flow of … Read more

1. Heidegger explained that his 1942 lectures on Hölderlin’s The Ister were not an analysis or an explication of the poem, but a series of comments that surrounded it. The film called The Ister constructs its project in parallel with this model, as a montage of comments surrounding Heidegger’s lectures. Accordingly, this essay will also proceed as a series of comments or contexts that circulate around the film.

2. Ross and Barrison’s videofilm, The Ister, represents one of the possible futures of cinema, and by synechdoche, the proliferating possibilities of the medium. The DV frontier means that moving images … Read more

The film The Ister (2004) by David Barison and Daniel Ross defines itself as a “remark” on Martin Heidegger’s lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Der Ister (1942). What is the meaning of this remark? What is “a remark”? And how can a documentary film provide a remark on a philosophical text that defines itself as beyond philosophy? What then, is a remark on Heidegger? According to Heidegger’s own understanding, the remark is a supplement. The remark accompanies the original text, it goes along with it. It is a way of writing that calls for moments of attention(Heidegger, Hölderlin’s The … Read more

Hideous corners of the city, scenes without a trace of sophistication, depressing enclosed spaces – this is the setting chosen for the desperate life drama of young Jan Ludvik. Its individual chapters are recalled as retrospectives by Jan himself as he travels in a train hurtling through the darkening landscape, in the company of a random female passenger whose miserable exterior renders her the embodiment of the bleakest of destinies. Jan was a gifted student and, by some strange quirk of fate, also a talented circus artist, but the world in which he lives drives him only to self-destructive actions. … Read more

Why do literary critics turn to film? Why do films turn to literary texts? The dialogue that follows is preoccupied by this double-fold question of film and philology. As part of an ongoing conversation about the responsibilities of our respective academic fields—English studies and Slavic studies—this dialogue considers the relation between film and philology comparatively, historically, and theoretically. Comparatively: what does the relation of film to philology tell us about the interrelation between the fields of English studies and Slavic studies? Historically: can we track a relation between the eclipse of philology and the birth of cinema (and then again, … Read more

At first glance—for those who grew up with Eastern European cinema—Clemens von Wedemeyer’s film “Otjezd” seems so astonishingly familiar that one can not believe it was not made by a “native viewer.” Gloomy, self-absorbed characters with fur hats, stuttering nervously or reciting poetry in dream-like surroundings seem to be a reference to Andrei Tarkovsky’s famous Mirror (1975). It is only when a living advertisement dressed as a green frog appears for a split second, chatting nonchalantly with bored policemen, that one begins to suspect that something has changed. There is obviously some capitalism around.

The simple Russian word otjezd, … Read more

“The world offers itself to us in full spectacle, but there is nothing to see except a deluded man who calls himself Emperor standing naked in the street”,(<www.guidetopsychology.com/terrorism.htm>) “King of terror hits Moscow cinema screens,”(<www.newsfromrussia.com>) “A Rider Named Death: Terrorism Before Chechnya,”(An interview Dostoyevsky vs.Nietzsche by Olga Shumyatskaya at www.english.mn.ru, N 39, 2004.) “In his new film, Karen Shakhnazarov uses Russian history to revisit the issue of terrorism…”(<www.filmfestival.com>)

These are only some of the titles which followed the international premiere of Karen Shakhnazarov’s latest film … Read more

New Video, New Europe: A Survey of Eastern European Video, The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 11 January — 22 February 2004(The exhibition will also travel to St. Louis and to the Tate in London.)

It is important to acknowledge the integral role video art has played in disrupting the institutional sanctity of the white cube. The traditional relationship between author, viewer, and subject gives way to spatial experiences that reconstitute the parameters of time and place. Video has also problematized standard curatorial practices presenting a new set of challenges, particularly how to display video works neither as … Read more

The echo on our publication of Dragan Kujundzic’s essay on Alexander Sokurov’s film Russian Ark (Russkij kovcheg) has been very lively. It is followed this week by another text or echo on the film by Raoul Eshelman. In addition, we have asked well-known critics and film historians for their responses to Sokurov’s film. These responses will be published over the next few weeks. Please find the first of them below. The questions we asked of all discussion participants were the following: “What will the moving image of St. Petersburg look like in the 21st century?” and “What … Read more

One of the most fascinating things about The Russian Ark, it seems to me, is that it is situated on the cusp between postmodernism and a new epoch in which such things as the experience of transcendence, the focus on simple subjects and things, theism, and the spatialization of time play a paramount role.

In other words, The Russian Ark can be viewed or read according to two distinctly different aesthetic paradigms. Since Dragan Kujundzic has already provided a thoroughly poststructuralist (i.e., postmodern) interpretation of the movie, I would like to reciprocate with a view from the other side … Read more

The Russian Ark. Directed by Alexander Sokurov. Starring Sergey Dreiden, Maria Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy. Written by Anatoly Nikiforov, Alexander Sokurov. Cinematography by Tilman Buettner. Music by the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra. Film: 2002, 99 min., 35 mm, color, Dolby Digital Video: 2002, 95 min., HD, 16:9, Dolby Surround. The State Hermitage Museum, Hermitage Bridge Studio, Egoli Tossell Film AG production, Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Fora-Film M, Celluloid Dreams. English Sub-titles. Special pre-screenings: Lincoln Plaza Cinema, New York City, December-January, 2002-3. Nuart Theater, Los Angeles, January 2003.

Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu etre triste pour … Read more