Novosti dnya
2006, 50 min., color & BW, Czech, Russian, English, super 8, 16 mm, 35 mm > video
A film shaped as a diary, a newsreel, and a journey eastward through history, language, and the Russian element.
Selected by Cinepur Choice, 2008
It begins like this:
There are verses, and film.
The diary is here.
And the whirlwind sweeps away the traces
of the ancien régime.
I have been pierced by the spears
of first encounters: you.
Today is December 3, 2005.
This is a Russian weekly.
And then a leap to Austerlitz, from which history seems to continue directly toward us. Like Napoleon, I travel to conquer Moscow. The camera is cold. Animals live alongside human beings, in parallel. I encounter nameless people who judge, think, sing, and recite. And I write a novel full of trapdoors, conversations, and ambiguities. Or perhaps I am only branching out the dictionary entries “Russia” and “Moscow.” We have no beginnings and no endings. We only become entangled in a web that may still be cut by the knife of understanding.
Stills from the film:
At a certain point, I understood the film as an attempt to compose a dictionary entry called “Russian element” from real visual and sonic traces of that phenomenon. I collected the material during a half-year stay in Russia. The journey eastward was sparked by the almost round anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz, accompanied by its historical reenactment. That clash, which took place in 1805, marked the end of the old feudal and aristocratic principle of rule, the ancien régime. My route to Moscow becomes a following of Napoleon I, the celebrated victor of the battle. In this gesture lies one of the film’s central ideas: history can repeat itself, with slight differences and under entirely changed conditions, because Russian conservatism can take on a strangely crystalline form, at once terrifying and beautiful.
The film’s “keyword” is composed of several “sub-words,” built around titles taken as found footage from Soviet newsreels of the 1970s and 1980s. The work can be presented in two different ways: as a classical sequential fifty-minute film, or as a menu-based project in which the order of the chapters can be chosen by the viewer.