Russian movies in a can

I accidentally watched a Russian film recently. This film was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the 74th Locarno International Film Festival. The director and the actors have little influence, and they can even be said to be unknown. It seems that this is the only way to introduce the film.

But the words "Russian film" will make people full of reverie, infinite reverie caused by blank space. After thinking about it, it is the famous Andrei Tarkovsky, Yutkiewicz, Pudovkin, Bondarchuk, Kalatozov, "Nostalgia", "War and Peace", "Quietly". Don River, "One Person's Experience", "The Dawns Here Are Quiet", "The Wild Goose Flying South", "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears"... But that is already the past of the former Soviet Union, and the blank space after that makes people suspicious. Is it because the world lost interest in Russian cinema, or after that, Russians simply rarely make films about their modern lives and stories.

Perhaps the most likely truth is that in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of films produced in Russia plummeted due to funding problems, and the film industry slid into a rock bottom. The Moscow Film Studio was once called "canned film studio" by directors, which means that most films are sealed in "cans" and cannot be seen by the audience.

After entering the new century, Russian films have gradually come out of the cans that "seal" them, and they have also frequently appeared in major film festivals, giving birth to such excellent films as "Leviathan" and "The Postman's White Night". Killing Munich" and "Arrhythmia", the biographical film "Sword Dance" about the composer Khachaturian in 2019... But you have to be patient and curious enough to follow the clues, open these tin cans, and feel yourself Interesting Russian films are released one by one.

Among them, there are also ones that don't need to be searched, and shock the world by themselves. "Lev Landau: Natasha", which will be shown to the world in the main competition unit of the Berlin Film Festival in 2020, has been implicated in a so-called "live experience project" that is full of uproar and controversy, the DAU project, also known as "Lev. The Landau Plan". At first director Ilya Kherzhanovsky just wanted to make a biopic of a Soviet physicist known as "the world's last almighty physicist" named Lev Davidovich Landau, from which the project was named.

For this biopic, a huge ex-Soviet scene was restored, and Khrzanovsky also had a new idea. This huge scene was no longer just a temporary set for a biopic. He wanted to A huge experience project extends from this setting. So they spent 12,000 square meters of land in Ukraine to build this former Soviet scene, including a small town in the Stalin era and a national scientific research center led by Lev Landau, to restore all the scenes in a one-to-one true scale.

Everything is ready, and this small circled world begins to work, where the currency of the Soviet Union circulates, and the life of the Soviet Union from 1938 to 1968 is restored. The project allows people from all over the world to come here as actors, but what they want to do is not to perform in the traditional sense, but to live completely in the Soviet Union that was built more than 80 years ago. In daily life, they are inspected and recorded by the camera in all directions without dead ends.

This project was started in 2009 and finished shooting in 2011, accumulating 700 hours of huge film material. It was finally unveiled to the world, and a total of fifteen films in the "Lev Landau DAU Series", including the first two, were announced. With the panic brought about by the new crown epidemic, people are very resistant to the series, and more importantly, the morality behind the collapse of filmmaking.

If the actors just "live" in it, most of them are not professional, but based on the interest of experience, they are called "actors" for the first time in this life scene, that is to say, the actress in "Natasha" The humiliation and rape she suffered was completely unexpected and happened in that scene. The pain and collapse shown on camera are also her real feelings, not performances. The American psychologist who was almost sexually assaulted in "Degeneration" was also interviewed by the French "Le Monde", saying that he had suffered severe psychological trauma during the filming, and it was difficult to talk about the scene at that time.

The evil from the system and people that the film originally wanted to show has also been weakened, and it all points to the evil of the experiment of "Lev Landau", which has become notorious.

It seems that after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, most Russian films focused on the dialectical reflection on Stalinism and institutions, and the setting of the story in the Soviet period, such as the "DAU Project", was not a metaphor, but an experiment. The way of recording is nakedly displayed, which is one of the most extreme cases. Kherzhanovsky, who created the project, has a strong Soviet complex and still sees himself as a Soviet.

In this way, Russian films are not only trapped by the objective factors of the "canned film studio" in the early years, but there is actually a huge ghost called the "Soviet Union" that keeps putting reality into the can. In history textbooks, it is a specific time with a beginning and an end, but in real life, it is not something unfamiliar. Even young people who have never lived in that era have always been surrounded by Soviet relics throughout their lives. surrounded.

And the question raised earlier, whether Russians rarely make movies about their modern life, is actually a misunderstanding, wrongly thinking that the Soviet tradition will collapse in an instant after a specific date, the world will undergo irreversible changes, and people will usher in Another very different life, and this life should be shown. The fact is that this part of the people who were born and raised in the Soviet Union is still alive, and by no means a minority. The Soviet era continues to spread among them, and they do not realize that they need to get rid of it, nor can they take the initiative to get rid of it.