Category: ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

The politically correct European has for a long time already considered Alexei Balabanov an out-and-out nationalist. The liberal public opinion in Russia is in agreement with this definition.

Both here and there the director of the film “War” is reproached with presenting only the Russian point of view on the conflict in Chechnya in the film. In the meantime, both there and here, the genre of the film is ignored for some reason.

Alexey Balabanov made “War” as a classical Western. The young Caucasian captive returns to Chechnya to rescue the bride (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) of the British fellow sufferer (Ian … Read more

Apart from the pun in the title (in Russian lyubov means love, but it’s also a woman’s name), some will admire the mega metafilmic framework of this film, while others may be irritated by its contortions.

The metafilm collides with a sci-fi plot. Alex, the only male character, is conducting an experiment in videoed dream-projection. He is consistently behind the camera: a modern entrepreneur in New Russia who speaks English with a Russian accent, he sets out to recruit women to dream about.

Women provide the material of both Alex’s experiment and the film itself, from the Western nightclub girl … Read more

Tender Age was produced by TriTe, Nikita Mikhalkov’s film production outfit. The script was written by Sergei Soloviev and his son Dmitri Soloviev, who also plays the main part in the film.

The film is, as most of Soloviev’s recent film, subdivided into episodes, which in turn have numerous intertitles that ironically reflect on the storyline. Here, the three parts are entitled: Idiot, Fathers and Sons, and War and Peace.

The film explores the fate of a generation of the children from families of with and elite status (party workers, foreign office civil servants, etc.) at … Read more

Galerie Behemot – June 15^th – July 7^th, 2001

One process that is peculiar to cinema is that of generating the impression of movement. Much like a still camera, a movie camera can only take one picture at a time, and the same is true with a projector, which can only show one frame at a time.

The film moves intermittently, driven and stopped by the sprockets, which in turn are driven by a crank or a motor. A motor and a camera are also just a few of the components that drove Veronika Drahotova to create … Read more

Late Night Talks with Mother (Nocni hovory s matkou). Dir. Jan Nemec (Czech Republic, 2000)

This new film from Czech director Jan Nemec has proved a surprise success at a number of festivals, including Plzen, Karlovy Vary, and Locarno, where it won the main award in the competition for video. It is now scheduled for London, Mannheim, and Rotterdam. Nemec directed such key 60s films as Diamonds of the Night (Demanty noci), The Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech), and Martyrs of Love (Mucednici lasky). He subsequently filmed the Soviet … Read more

The script “Moscow” by the well-known prose writer and conceptualist Vladimir Sorokin (written jointly with A. Zeldovich) explored the emergence of a new language of power, a discourse of the “new Russians” from the splinters of the Soviet monolith and from recollections about totalitarian culture.

According to the script this discourse of a new totalitarianism (that emerged, it seems, on the basis of free enterprise!) has literally been formed in front of our eyes, has absorbed the most colourful characters (Mike, Mark), and has opened the path for a non-entity that covers its facelessness with a multiplicity of faces (Lev).… Read more

For over an entire century theater has existed as make-believe, as it has tried to create the illusion of reality on stage by developing the notion of empathy in order to stimulate the spectator emotionally. For over three quarters of a century this conventional, realistic theater has coexisted with a “theater as theater” that opposes these principles and seeks instead to push the spectator towards a rational response to the stage events, to make him aware of the spectacle, and to use its effects and attractions to enhance theatricality.

Cultural history, be it in theater, cinema, architecture or the … Read more