Voices II: Essays on DAU

Author

Keti Chukhrov, Daria Ezerova, Philip Cavendish, Elena Kostyleva, Grey Violet, Svetlana Dragaeva, Michał Murawski

Abstract

The “Voices” section in Apparatus serves as a venue for a wide range of critical reflections and responses. The positions adopted or views expressed are not constrained by the traditional formalities of academic writing. The contributions may take the form of critical exegesis, polemic, journalistic and/or diaristic reflection, or personal (confessional) response. The principle that unites them is (relative) brevity in terms of length and concentration of focus. The contributors in question were among a number of academics, researchers, and cultural commentators invited by the editors of Apparatus for their responses to DAU after the panel discussions of the project hosted on 7 December 2020 and 26 January 2021 by the Russian Cinema Research Group at University College London, on 23 September 2020 by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, on 15 January 2021 by the European University at St. Petersburg.

Keywords

Antonin Artaud; Georges Bataille; Natalia Berezhnaya; Ilya Khrzhanovskiy; Lev Landau; Kora Landau-Drobantseva; Andrei Losev; Denis Shibanov; Soviet Union; totalitarianism; film; theatre; contemporary art; performance; Moscow actionism; processuality; architecture; agency; unwatchability; potlatch; feminist critique; authenticity; body; reception; radical experience; victimisation; DAU set; capitalist realism; sexuality; gender.

From the Open Process to the Sneaked Performance

I

Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s DAU is an open-ended project that comprises numerous genres – film, theatre, reality show, role game, architecture, sociological experiment, scientific workshop, occult ritual, performance.¹ Such dismissal of a completed art-work is not new for the early post-Soviet culture. Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, in his reluctance to comply with the rules of the composed end-product, has predecessors, such as, among others, theatre directors Anatolii Vasil’ev, Boris Iukhananov, and composer Vladimir Martynov. In 2002, Martynov wrote a book, Konets vremeni kompozitorov [The End of the Composers’ Era], in which he insisted that the age of a composed piece (opus) with its beginning and end had withered (Martynov 2002). According to him, the contemporary musical form should open up as a pattern variation without the demiurgic intervention of a composer to create a scored composition. Anatolii Vasil’ev convened a method which would function as a living theatrical organism through the regime of endless rehearsing, so that a staged performance would rather become a research laboratory of constant acting, rather than an ultimate spectacle. Boris Iukhananov – himself a disciple of Vasil’ev – coined the term “the new processuality” (novaia protsessual’nost’) to emphasise the dismissal of the end product, the latter being nothing but a prey for consumption, or an object of total design and technology.² (This standpoint is quite in the vein of the repulsion of Antonin Artaud towards the end product, or of Jacques Derrida’s writing on Artaud in this connection (Derrida 2000)).

The Soviet underground art of the 1970s and 1980s often associated “Western” art and culture with such anarchic spontaneity and an open-ended creative process. Meanwhile, as Boris Iukhananov shrewdly puts it, the expectations of the Soviet underground that Western liberal democracy could be identified with anarchic contingency proved to be an illusion. The discovery of the post-Soviet 1990s was that Western democracy and its cultural and artistic institutions were also dependent on social commission and systemic constraints. According to Iukhananov, in the eyes of the ‘barbarian’ post-Soviet underground artists, ‘Western’ culture after the end of the Cold War appeared no less regulated than Stalinist totalitarianism. Moscow actionism of the 1990s – Anatolii Osmolovskii, Oleg Kulik, Aleksandr Brener, the Radek community – was an affective reaction to such a discovery. And indeed, the actionist outbursts of the 1990s were not so much a resistance against the former Soviet totalitarianism, which by that time had already been demolished, but rather against the global art-system which turned out to be as protocol-driven as Soviet cultural politics.

As Iukhananov emphasises, an open-ended ‘processuality’ would not evolve ergonomically as a classical work of art, or as a conceptual/post-conceptual art-piece; nor would it be a cinematic attraction, or a theatrical show. It would expand into multiple performative currents, role intersections, and unexpected outcomes, without any ultimate decisionism on the part of the author. No surprise that Iukhananov acknowledged the DAU project to be a successor to his method.³

Meanwhile, an inevitable ‘decadence’ is inscribed into both – not only the end product of creative industry, but the rejection of an end-product, too. Indeed, the end-product is susceptible to vanishing by virtue of being inevitably consumed. But even if one develops a constant process instead of a ‘dead’, composed form, the subverting procedures that are fixed on nothing but destruction only reproduce that form’s ‘totalitarian’ features. So paradoxically, the poetics of decomposing the totalitarian form mainly feeds on the totalitarian qualities of that form, as it is unable to construct a new counter-totalitarian form.

II

Contemporary art got rid of the concept of composition a century ago, and superseded it with a conceptual gimmick or theoretical speculation. (A ready-made is a good example of such supersession). Art performance was part and parcel of this episteme. Theatre and cinema could never do it. A conventional cinematic piece could only follow one plot, one set of characters, one temporal sequence – as it would be impossible to watch many films simultaneously. To empty cinema of its composed contents altogether would be possible only by means of a total eclipse of the image or an abolition of comprehensible narrative. But in such a case we would get an art-piece. Khrzhanovskiy did not have the intention to turn a cinematic film into an artist’s film. Yet he did not remain within the constraints of a regular filmic form either. Instead of sublating composition by means of conceptual parameters – as is the case with contemporary art – Khrzhanovskiy dismissed composition by means of proliferating the self-developing narratives and filmic tracks with an open end.

In contemporary art, the agent of performance is the artist herself. This is why, paradoxically, art dispenses with the performative composition and its processuality in favour of the conceptual artistic gesture. This is why the hired performers who might constitute the body of an art performance usually remain anonymous and the authorship belongs to the artist solely. In cinema and theatre, conversely, composition is retained. This allows labour and agency to be divided between several agents (writer, director, actors); the crucial function is therefore ascribed to actors as the agents of performance. Theatre and cinema do not fully reject the score, script and composition, because such refusal would deprive the actors of their artistic agency and performative hubris.

What is truly embarrassing in the DAU project is that Khrzhanovskiy, while taking no pains with the obligation to draft the screenplay, retains the artistic labour of the performers and leaves them alone with the responsibility of generating that very screenplay on their own. The research institute as the setting becomes in this case a factory of the performative rendering of human fates, biographies, and relations. The project generates chains of excessive performative behaviour, without the obligation for a script-writer or a director to draft them. In other words, the participants are not only exposed to being recorded, as usually happens in a reality-show, but they themselves create their unique trajectories of performative behaviour, which in film and theatre are usually composed by the writer and director. Meanwhile, the excessive artistic performance by the project participants exceeds the passively documented life of a reality show, revealing the artistic ingenuity of each performer; and it is mainly on this ingenuity that the project hinges. The poetics and artifice of acting is thus preserved as indispensable (quite the converse of contemporary art), but the director himself steps out of the process of its composing. Yet, while the participants, with their biographies, idiosyncrasies, and manoeuvres of conduct bear the burden of being practically the main subjects in the development of the action, the distribution of authorities in the project does not allow them to get the benefit of their artistic achievement. De jure they count as mere volunteers in the research experiment, rather than the agents and co-creators within the art-work. And indeed, the protagonists of the experiment were considered merely to be living their usual lives and voluntarily complying with certain rules of the game. However, not only the responsibility for the performative improvisation, but also the ethical burden related to violent or abusive mise-en-scènes, was also placed on their shoulders.

The exposure of the tragic, violent, or atrocious events, when they are enacted in an art-piece, requires taking sides. The author of an art-work is expected, therefore, to be present within the piece in order to clearly reveal their position, rather than delegate it completely to the volunteers in the role-game. Furthermore, the explicit ethical standpoint can only be demonstrated due to becoming part of the common body in the performing procedure. Vasil’ev and Iukhananov, even despite their subversive transformations of the score, always stood inside such a common body of performing process. The question to the DAU project, which inevitably arises in this connection, is the following: can it be that the director, who steps out of the game and functions as its manager rather than the participant of the dramatic enactment, gets into the position of a “Big Brother”, and who consciously or unconsciously enhances his power and gets surplus enjoyment from such an enhancement? Indeed, in DAU the role of the director is confined mainly to the macro-control of the whole process, as he is uninvolved in creating the sensuous trajectories of performance.

Yet the more rupture there is between the performative process and the director’s detached sovereignty, the less the performative contribution of the actors has the chance to acquire the dimension of artistic achievement and earn the symbolic reward for it. While many see the merits of the DAU project in the critical reconstruction of Soviet ideology, its proper achievement lies in the unprecedented (and underrated) courage and ingenuity of the amateur performers in inhabiting the transitory line between being and performing.

Keti Chukhrov
Higher School of Economics (Moscow)

Watching the Unwatchable: DAU

André Bazin declared two things “unrepresentable” on film: sex and death (Bazin 2003). More than half a century later, unsimulated sex has been normalised in art cinema (Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Abel Ferrara, Abdellatif Kechiche, Leos Carax, Lars von Trier) to the point that it is no longer a ‘sujet de scandale’. Representations of homicide or suicide that claim to be authentic remain taboo, the ultimate form of the unwatchable. Yet here, too, Bazin’s taboo has been broken, suffice it to remember Kantemir Balagov’s Tesnota / Closeness (2017, Russia), Eric Steel’s The Bridge (2006, United Kingdom, United States), or, in a rather different cultural sphere, ISIS videos. Animal cruelty – which has not been taboo, but perhaps should be – assails viewers of Stachka / Strike (1924, Sergei Eisenstein, USSR), Le sang des bêtes (1948, Georges Franju, France), and Andrei Rublev (1966, Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR). In sum, the ostensibly unrepresentable has proven to be eminently watchable, canonised, taught in universities, and broadcast on the news. Postmodern ‘viewing fatigue’ has changed both what can be shown and what the viewers can stomach. All of this being said, I found DAU essentially unwatchable.

The “unwatchable” remains a fluid concept across its usages. It may be synonymous with any and all of the following: “disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious [...] literally inaccessible”, low-quality, triggering, transgressive – and the list goes on (Baer et al. 2019: 3). At the same time, it is not just about what “unwatchable” is, but also when and for whom. The audience at the Studio des Ursulines on June 6, 1929 may have found the opening scene of Un chien andalou (1929, Luis Buñuel, France) unwatchable. A twenty-first-century viewer is less likely to see it that way since the film has been canonised and the slashed eye has become an iconic image of world cinema. With so many variables at work, I find Alenka Zupančič approach to the unwatchable particularly illuminating. Encompassing but not reducible to a sense “moral outrage”, “unwatchability is [a] declaration of an ontological impossibility: ‘This simply cannot be (or else I disappear as a subject), this is ‹ontologically wrong›!’” (Zupančič 2019: 50). The notion of disturbing the viewer’s subjectivity is pertinent to Khrzhanovskiy’s project.

Two aspects of DAU stand out in terms of “unwatchability” – length and a certain ethical unpleasantness. This latter aspect resides in the relationship that DAU constructs with its viewers, which we will come back to. But first some comments about the kind of long film-work it aspires to be. To gain some sense of DAU, one needs to watch more than one film, which means a minimum of six-to-eight hours of viewing. Thus, it puts itself in implicit comparison with ultra-long works like Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998, France, Switzerland), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980, FRG), or even Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985, France), all of them endowed with a strong ethical imperative. Watching DAU, I felt more like Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971, Stanley Kubrick, UK, USA), forced to watch the unwatchable for the purposes of being manipulated. There is an immersive quality to the work that minimises the critical distance between the viewer and the events on screen, producing, in my view, an unbridgeable gap between the kind of modernist ethics of vérité that the project has been packaged to evoke and the entirely less ethical experience that it actually produces.

One gleans from interviews with Khrzhanovskiy that DAU’s purported project is to expose the dark side of the Stalinist state and its effects on the human psyche. Sophie Pinkham has pointed out that this dark side was long ago exposed in great detail and doing so again is hardly an urgent project (Pinkham 2020). The belatedness or perhaps even cliché of DAU’s political aspirations aside, I would highlight that the project does not so much expose the dark side of the Soviet experience as use it as a way of savouring a certain sort of cinematic unpleasantness, much of it thoroughly (post)modern rather than Stalin-era. As Asbjørn Grønstad writes, transgression in cinema, such as images of extreme violence, often ultimately serves an ethical project: the scopophilic pleasure is denied to the viewers in order to “jolt our bodies in such a way as to produce critical awareness and ethical insight” (Grønstad 2019: 153).⁴ This, as is foundational to the entire project of critique, relies on a critical distance between the viewer and the spectacle, a clearly articulated external vantage point. Examples of successful political critiques constructed in this way abound, from Brecht’s epic theatre to The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012, Denmark, Norway, UK) that draws its shocking power from pretend-staging its horrific events, without as much as showing a photo of them. By contrast, DAU obsessively seeks to minimise the critical distance to near-elimination.
DAU clearly positions itself in relation to vérité but this positioning is rather tenuous. The main cinematographer is Jürgen Jürges, known for his work with Fassbinder and with Michael Haneke on Funny Games (1997, Austria), which takes an almost censorious approach to teaching the viewer not to enjoy violent images. However, DAU draws the viewer into its world in a way that makes the jolt into critical and ethical awareness impossible. The drab, windowless interiors populated by the bodies that are penetrated, beaten, sodomised, or ejaculated on reveal a calculated intent to create a claustrophobic sense of proximity. The awareness of the fact that the films’ most unpalatable characters are played by the people who hold similar jobs or espouse similar ideologies in real life today, creates a discomfiting feeling of DAU’s darkness seeping into reality – Khrzhanovskiy seeks to turn his film, to paraphrase Siegfried Kracauer’s metaphor, not into Athena’s polished shield but into very nearly Medusa herself (Kracauer 1997: 57-58). The films’ soporific uneventfulness is interspersed with bacchanals of violence, coalescing into a viewing experience that rather closely resembles Azhippo’s words to Natasha: “We are not going to let you sleep. You’ll be forced up with a kick” (DAU. Natasha). Combined and reinforced over the course of many hours, these elements inure the viewers to violence. In short, DAU’s violence – physical, especially sexual, and psychological – is normalised, not as a testament to the pervasiveness of totalitarian horrors, but because it is fetishised and used to manipulate the viewer, an aesthetic and ethical failure that renders the films unwatchable.
As a concept, the “unwatchable” is not necessarily a negative thing – or at least not an uninteresting one. As the editors of the volume Unwatchable argue in the introduction, the unwatchable “challenges established genre designations, along with the divides between high and low culture, art and popular entertainment” (Baer et al. 2019: 5). The latter opens the floor to a broader discussion of how the unwatchable articulates postmodernism in cinema. But this, unfortunately, is not the case with DAU. In a posturing attempt to create a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk to rival the masters of cinema, Khrzhanovskiy does not incorporate elements of the unwatchable in DAU as part of a critical project, but makes it unwatchable in its totality through the kind of engagement with the viewer he creates. And as we know from Kubrick’s film, the Ludovico technique does not work.

Daria V. Ezerova
Columbia University
de2405@columbia.edu

Journey into the Vortex: Stalinist “Terror” and DAU. Brave People

The tension between the cinematic representation of authentic, spontaneous, and unmediated experience (the documentary or reality principle) and the contrived, manipulated, fabricated, and choreographed (the principle of the fictional or invented) lies at the very heart of Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s DAU project. This tension, perhaps better described as an aesthetic fault line, occasionally triggers seismic reverberations. It is located in the elusiveness of the project’s chronotope (the co-existence or fusion of an artificially constructed historical past with a barely disguised contemporaneous present) and the eclectic design of the building in which the project’s participants are notionally incarcerated (the brainchild of Denis Shibanov, and ostensibly modelled on the historical Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow, this building departs significantly from the neo-classical architecture of Boris Iofan’s 1938 original and resolutely ignores the English-style interiors of the personal “osobniak”, dubbed the “kapichnik”, which accommodated the Institute’s first Director, Petr Kapitsa, and which was an exact replica of his rooms at the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge, where he had researched electromagnetic fields and low-temperature physics before his enforced return to the Soviet Union in 1934). The fault line is also palpable in the complex interweaving of subjects suggested by the memoirs of Kora Landau-Drobantseva, the wife and later widow of Lev Landau (after whom the project is named), in particular the theme of free love, and the romantic/erotic entanglements that emerged between participants at various stages in the project’s evolution, some of them allegedly genuine. Uncertainty in relation to what has been orchestrated in advance, and therefore to some extent what might be regarded as staged, and the principles underpinning the editing procedures once the filmic material had been shot, with some sections of the material, like generic building blocks, redeployable and potentially able to serve different narrative purposes, leaves the viewer in a state of limbo. Until the larger pattern of DAU as a multi-media offering has become apparent, the critical response to the materials released so far (fourteen feature-length films in total) must inevitably remain tentative. Certainly, the failure to activate the interactive viewing platform on the project’s official website, with its hint of multiple pathways, and therefore potential mutability, suggests that the revelation of this larger pattern is not on the immediate horizon.

The contamination of the documentary principle, insofar as this principle is ever actually achievable in practice, is illustrated by several DAU films, most notably DAU. Novyi chelovek / DAU. New Man (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Ilya Permyakov, 2020), which witnesses the destruction of the Institute and the “murder” of its employees, but also, perhaps most intriguingly, DAU. Smelye liudi (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Aleksey Slusarchuk, 2020). Unlike the former, and indeed the vast majority of the films released hitherto, the events of this latter film take place within a specific historical time-frame: the weeks and months following immediately after Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953. Several scenes are modelled on the denunciations, arrests, and coded anti-semitism associated with the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s; others, most notably the verbatim reading out of the decree (“Ob amnistii” / “On Amnesty”) issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which declared an amnesty for multiple categories of gulag prisoners (but not political prisoners), and was published in Pravda on March 28, 1953, show the initial steps towards a more liberal and humane era (commonly known as the Khrushchev “Thaw”). The dramatic climax of the film, one which, it may be speculated, has given rise to the title of the film itself, consists of the interrogation of Professor Andrei Losev, a theoretical physicist specialising in Quantum Mechanics and String Theory, by two officials responsible for security at the Institute, as a result of which Losev is compelled to sign a non-disclosure agreement; significantly, the document, laboriously written out by hand in ink, is dated April 15, 1953. Such ‘events”’ are self-evidently the product of manipulation or contrivance on the part of Khrzhanovskiy, who is credited, along with Sergei Adon′ev, the oligarch who largely financed DAU, as the film’s “co-creator”. One of the early sequences, in which Andrei Blinov, another of the Institute’s scientists, explains his research into the dynamics of liquid vortices to a visiting documentary filmmaker, might be regarded as laying the foundation for the entire conceptual edifice. This has been elaborately engineered in order to compel the Institute’s researchers, most prominently Losev and his wife, Darya Berzhitskaya, to relive or re-experience the traumas of the late-Stalinist years. The opening and closing images of laboratory rats – the first experiencing a post-operation suture, presumably after brain surgery, and the second clinically decapitated – exude a sinister, if not palpably Orwellian atmosphere. At the very least, they insinuate an overarching theme.

The ramifications of this pseudo-historical framework are tangible in other sequences as well, most notably the scene in which Losev and Blinov hypothesise conundrums in relation to space travel which they know in reality to have been resolved many decades ago. Such exchanges constitute a mode of quasi-theatrical performance in the sense that the two scientists have been invited to suppress their knowledge of the contemporary world and, rather in the manner of professional actors, to adopt the intellectual horizons of a different historical epoch. Such a strategy potentially brings DAU into the sphere of the reimagined, resurrected, or restaged past, but also, at the same time, the zone of the faux, parallel, or alternative history. The invented history of the Institute penned by Dmitrii Kaledin (2019), the academic in charge of the Laboratory of Mathematical Physics, and later, from 1960 to 1966, Director of the Institute as a whole, and the faux biographies of research staff and non-academic employees listed on the official DAU website, reveal a similar conceptual strategy at play.

The precedents in the sphere of Russian literature and cinema are numerous. In the category of the former, one might include Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra (1992), an alternative history of the Soviet space programme, and Denis Osokin’s Angely i revoliutsiia /Angels and Revolution, a patchwork quilt of “found texts” supposedly written in 1923 by a “writer-primitivist” living in Viatka. In the realms of cinema, whether consciously or unconsciously, DAU engages intertextually with a number of films in different genres about individual scientists or scientific communities: contemporary dramas, for example Mikhail Romm’s Deviat′ dnei odnogo goda / Nine Days in One Year (1962, Soviet Union), which is set within a community of nuclear-particle physicists and was watched by Landau and his wife at the time of its release (Landau-Drobantseva 1999: 340); screen adaptations of science-fiction novels, for example Andrei Tarkovskii’s Solaris (1972), with its pseudo-documentary footage of the official investigation into Burton’s mission to Solaris; and semi-fictionalised biographies, for example Zdravstvui, eto ia / Hi, it’s me (1965, Soviet Union), directed by Frunze Dovlatian, and also mentioned in Drobantseva’s memoirs (1999: 197), which was modelled on the relationship between Nina Varzar (aka “Nita”, the physicist and first wife of Dmitrii Shostakovich) and Artem Alikhanian (the first Director of the Yerevan Institute of Physics), both of them close friends.

Additional points of cinematic reference might be identified (perhaps unexpectedly) in Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Vesna / Spring (1947, Soviet Union), a self-consciously playful musical comedy, the action of which takes place in a research institute experimenting with methods of harnessing solar energy. Bearing in mind the ambiguous relationship between spontaneity and contrivance in DAU. Smelye liudi, and the meta-cinematic presence of the visiting documentary filmmaker, it might be regarded as (head-spinningly) resonant that one of the more memorable sequences in Vesna shows a professional actor, Liubov′ Orlova, who is playing the role of Irina Nikitina, the Director of the Institute, reading the lines of a variety artist (Vera Shatrova, also played by Orlova), who has been engaged to play the character of Nikitina in a forthcoming fiction film (Uchenaia / The Female Scientist) about her work at the Institute (Nikitina’s disparaging dismissal of cinema in terms of “эффекты, штуки, трюки, побасенки” (“effects, stunts, tricks, and witticisms” – my translation), might be regarded as similarly resonant). Potential cinematic precursors also include works belonging to the genre of the mockumentary or faux documentary, for example Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Pervye na lune / First on the Moon (2005, Russia), which presents with apparent documentary veracity an event, a Soviet space mission landing on the moon, which never actually happened. Bearing in mind the official emphasis in the late 1940s on the celebration of Russian and Soviet scientific achievement, and the specific references in DAU. Smelye liudi to the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns in the second half of the 1940s, it might also be worth mentioning Abram Room’s Sud chesti / Honour Court (1948, Soviet Union), scripted by Aleksandr Shtein on the basis of his play, Zakon chesti / The Law of Honour, which was commissioned by the Politburo and modelled on an actual honour court convened in the summer of 1946 to consider the cases of Nina Kliueva and Grigorii Roskin, two scientists roundly condemned for privileging the international sharing of research above the interests of the Soviet state (Krementsov 1995). It is pure coincidence that the main character in this film, Professor Sergei Losev, shares the same surname as the vulnerable protagonist in DAU. Smelye liudi. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasise that the scientists working at the historical Institute of Physical Problems did not escape unscathed from this type of attack. Kapitsa, for example, had been removed from his position as Director in August 1946 partly as a result of an ongoing conflict with Lavrentii Beria (Kozhevnikov 1991: 153-64). Furthermore, the names of several scientists at the Institute, including Landau and Kapitsa, appeared on a list of “cosmopolitans” drawn up by the committee in charge of organising an honour court for Soviet physicists in March 1949 (Kozhevnikov 1991: 161-62; Kneen 1998). Drobantseva (2011: 94) refers to the delicate position of her husband at this time, and explains that it was only thanks to the intervention of Igor′ Kurchatov, the scientist in charge of the committee overseeing the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb programme, that the anti-cosmopolitan campaign was prevented from gathering momentum as far as physicists were concerned.

Losev’s interrogation by security officials at the Institute, namely, Pavel Gordienko, Head of the Special Administrative Department (presumably an employee of the Ministry of State Security, or MGB), and Vladimir Ermolenko, Deputy Director for Safety and Regulations, underlines the turbulent dynamics of the vortex into which the participants have been plunged. Bearing in mind the challenges of recreating an exact simulacrum of the late-Stalinist terror, and the confidence on the part of some participants, for example Eкaterina Uspina (Melikova 2020) and Natalia Berezhnaya (Belikov 2020), whose interrogations are shown in DAU. Katya Tanya (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Jekaterina Oertel) and DAU. Natasha (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Jekaterina Oertel) that there must be limits on the degree of physical violence to which they could be subjected, Losev’s breakdown during questioning, witnessed in the trembling of his body and the breaking of his voice when verbally abused and physically threatened, is profoundly distressing. In the absence of explicit explanation or confession (one of the ways in which the DAU project differentiates itself from reality tv), the causes of this breakdown must inevitably become the object of speculation on the part of the viewer. The gradually increasing perception of menace, realised in the arrests of two scientists (their exact professional status at the Institute unclear), and a subsequent raid on the administrative offices of the research laboratories, during which agents refer cryptically and ominously to research trips abroad undertaken by Blinov, undeniably constitute significant points of psychological pressure. The scientists themselves are filmed discussing the impact of the arrests and their increasing agitation and nervousness. Losev himself testified to a journalist just days before his interrogation that the arrests, coupled with rumours of beatings, had caused him to smoke for the first time in fifteen years; as he comments, “Мне было буквально плохо, страшно, я испытывал эмоции по настоящей шкале” (“I felt literally ill, terrified, I experienced genuine extremes of emotion” (Kashin 2010 – my translation)). Later in the same interview he remarks that: “Если человек умирает от страха, то он умирает от страха, а не оттого, реально ли это, чего он боится” (“If a person is dying of terror, he is dying of terror, it doesn’t matter whether what he feels is real or not” – my translation). At this stage in the project, judging from these words, Losev appeared to have accepted all too readily the “rules of the game” operating within the DAU complex; indeed, he explains that his “transformation” into a “new man” had given rise to an ardent belief in the value of the “social contract” that made his research possible. The idea of a “contract”, which reflects the rhetoric of the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns and also underpins the guilt-strategy adopted by his interrogators (their references to the various state awards given to Losev, and his lack of gratitude), possibly explains Losev’s earlier denunciation of Chernobrov, one of the two arrested scientists, on the grounds of incompetence, arguing that research which does not meet the standards of scientific “truth” is a “crime” and dereliction of patriotic duty that should be punished according to the “norms of war-time”. The fact that the arrestees in question are pseudo-scientists, if not quack scientists, who belong to the wilder fringes of scientific speculation, is deliberately concealed from viewers. The first, Konstantin Leshan, who later ‘confesses’ to having spied for the Germans and planning “acts of terrorism”, is in reality an independent researcher whose only claim to fame hitherto lies in his promotion of fanciful theories relating to the possibilities of “vacuum physics” (dyrochnaia fizika), teleportation, and levitation (Leshan 2001). The second, Vadim Chernobrov (the MGB agents name him “Vladimir Aleksandrovich Chernobrov” as they search his room, but this would appear to be an oversight, possibly a clerical error), was, until his untimely death in 2017, one of Russia’s more notorious UFO ‘specialists’, as well as a self-confessed mystery enthusiast and meteorite hunter (Anon 2017). The sequences in which they present their ‘research’ are too brief to grasp adequately the content, very probably deliberately so, but the reactions of the panels in both cases – incredulity only barely concealed by professional courtesy (Losev is more contemptuous in private) – suggest that the findings in question are very far from scientifically plausible. It is an irony, perhaps even a paradox, that Losev’s own interrogation takes place not only after the new amnesty, in other words, at a time which supposedly signals a more liberal direction on the part of the authorities, but also after his own (seemingly unapologetic) recanting of his earlier views. To his credit, despite multiple attempts to “insult and humiliate him” (his own words as he describes the experience to his wife) and gibes about his “Jewish essence”, Losev refuses to inform on his colleagues.

The ‘success’ of the psychological experiment conducted on Losev has profound ramifications, not only for him, but also for his wife; indeed, it could be argued that the distress of Berzhitskaya on learning the details of her husband’s ordeal, which culminates in her own breakdown at some unspecified point afterwards, is more disturbing than the interrogation itself. The dramatic situation that ensues undeniably represents a ‘coup’ in terms of DAU’s methodology. Nevertheless, ethical questions must surely arise in view of the severity and volatility of the breakdown. It might be regarded as symptomatic of these concerns that the couple subsequently decided to quit the project; this is confirmed in Kaledin’s faux-history of the Institute (Kaledin 2019), but has already been implied by the verbal exchanges between Losev and Berzhitskaya at various points on the evening of the interrogation, and the penultimate scene of the film, which shows them walking together, dressed formally, through the dark corridors connecting the laboratories. As with the interrogation, the precise causes of the breakdown are insinuated rather than explicitly confessed. The impact of her husband’s ordeal, an explosive argument with Blinov, which appears to be related to Berzhitskaya’s lack of privacy, or may simply be the product of her personal antipathy towards him, her isolation among the other scientific couples by virtue of her relative youth, her perhaps inevitable discomfort with the fact that her life, including scenes of intimacy with her husband, is being observed and filmed, and the influence of alcohol, might all be regarded as contributing factors. The editing of the material, in other words, the deliberate intercutting between scenes showing Berzhitskaya’s drunken insistence that her husband tell Blinov to “fuck off” directly to his face, and those filmed at a social occasion in a neighbouring apartment, during which Kaledin presents an expensive fur-coat and wrap to his girlfriend, Olga Shkabarnya, seems designed to juxtapose the banality of material gratification with reverberations of profound emotional and psychological disturbance (it is perhaps worth noting that Kaledin and Shkabarnia, who met each other as participants and feature as the protagonists in DAU. Regeneratsiia / DAU. Regeneration (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Ilya Permyakov) subsequently got married). Editing cuts conceal the exact order and time-sequence of the events that follow, among them another visit by security agents, this time to the apartment of Nikita Nekrasov, who has departed on an unspecified “komandirovka”, but a few days later (or thereabouts) Berzhitskaya is filmed weeping uncontrollably and asking her husband to “save her”.

Discerning viewers may identify one or two lapses in the faux-historical continuum of DAU. Smelye liudi. Zoya Popova, for example, described as the Institute’s Academic Secretary on the DAU website, toasts Stalin in a speech that celebrates the emerging ties between scientific and artistic communities without referring to the fact that the Great Leader is no longer alive. Whether or not such lapses matter in relation to a fabricated historical narrative is a moot point: what matters more perhaps is the impression of the era, its material and psychological imprint, and the general atmosphere, not its precise reification. Defenders of the project can argue, perfectly legitimately, that nothing in DAU. Smelye liudi has been choreographed or rehearsed in advance, and therefore the events can be regarded as spontaneous and authentic. On the other hand, the artifice of the historical straightjacket within which the participants have been (willingly) imprisoned, the deliberate shaping of the material by means of overarching themes and motifs, the elliptical editing procedures, which withhold important information at critical junctures, thereby obscuring the mechanisms of causality, and even the ironic prefiguring of future events (Losev’s joke about Soviet interrogation techniques during the Korean War is a good case in the point) suggest that DAU. Smelye liudi is geared more towards the provocation of emotional extremes than a profound analysis of the human psyche under pressure. As a laboratory experiment that seeks to investigate both the historical phenomenon of Stalinist terror and the contemporary response to its restaging or reification, the DAU project lacks clinical (psychoanalytical) rigour. This is a contention with which Losev and his wife, now liberated from their Stalinist nightmare, might well possibly concur.

Philip Cavendish
UCL SSEES, London
p.cavendish@ucl.ac.uk

“Увидеть Дьявола”. Проект ДАУ как алхимический потлач

В случае с ДАУ я ангажирована, причем очень глубоко ангажирована, несколькими взаимоисключающими позициями. И потому моя задача – выйти из них в метапозицию, чтобы перейти к анализу проекта ДАУ. Позиции эти таковы.

Как радикальный художник, как поэт, я не могу не видеть, что это произведение задумано и воспринимается как радикальное, а значит, оно куда-то вперед (или назад) двигает искусство из его гомеостаза.

Как аспирантка Европейского университета в Санкт-Петербурге, я вовлечена в подготовку этого мероприятия и развернувшуюся вокруг него дискуссию⁵, и поставлена перед дилеммой о том, к кому примкнуть – к студентам, объявившим бойкот режиссеру, к студентам, которые считают по старинке, что гению можно все, или к студентам, которые настолько заняты своей научной работой, что не смотрят кино.

Как феминистка, я поддерживала и поддерживаю вопрошание русскоязычного феминистского сайта о кино Кимкибабадук,⁶ который ведут Мария Кувшинова и Татьяна Шорохова, о способах производства картины, об этических проблемах, которые возникали во время съемок. После того, как Татьяна подписала письмо с вопросами к организаторам Берлинале, против них в русскоязычной медиасфере была развязана кампания, которую корректнее всего было бы назвать войной.⁷

Их вопросы заключались в следующем:

1. Мог ли проект, подобный ДАУ, быть снят в стране ‘первого’ мира?

Действительно, можем ли мы представить себе актрису из страны ‘первого’ мира, которая соглашается на насилие во время съемок, которое, к тому же, не описано заранее в сценарии?

2. Можно ли снимать людей, занимающихся сексом, в состоянии алкогольного опьянения?

Постепенно к этим вопросам прибавилось множество других. Так, в прессе обсуждалось, насколько добровольно актрисы участвовали в сценах насилия – например, в знаменитой сцене с бутылкой из фильма ДАУ. Наташа. Всплыл скандал с американским художником, который был на съемках избит и унижен. Обсуждалась смерть зарезанной перед камерой свиньи. Обсуждались и обсуждаются съемки младенцев, взятых на время из детского дома для съемок эксперимента, во время которого мы не знаем точно, что с детьми происходило, но они плакали (а некоторые улыбались). Обсуждался и обсуждается приезд на съемочную площадку в Харьков группы людей с аутизмом в сопровождении родителей.

Сейчас Марию Кувшинову объявили персоной нон грата, российские кинофестивали не хотят слышать никаких мнений кроме тех, которые они уже слышали. Это тупик, и эту ситуацию необходимо менять. Российское кинокритическое сообщество, столь яростно отказывающие Кувшиновой и Шороховой в праве обсуждать насилие в фильме и в процессе его производства, показывает свою неготовность к конфликтам и слабость.

Как начинающий философ я не могу игнорировать обращение создателей фильма феномену советского, с одной стороны, и к творчеству Вильгельма Райха – с другой, и надеюсь, что после скандалов уже можно будет к этому обратиться.

Наконец, как читательница и кинозрительница с большим стажем, я сохраняю преданность кинематографу своей молодости и его прорывам. У нас было принято смотреть боевики, где людей, а не только свиней, убивали раз в минуту: 1990-е прошли под знаком инспирированного восточной жестокостью Тарантино, Германа-старшего и Балабанова, после чего фон Триер казался очень компромиссным либеральным режиссером, а все остальные попсой. Мы представляли себя героями боевиков, трансгрессорами, мы читали Жене, Арто, Батая, мы жили возможностью трансгрессии. Мы жили в боевике.

И вот мы оказались в другом времени, когда все наши предыдущие любовные отношения признаны абьюзом, а произведения искусства, на которых мы росли, как оказалось, нельзя пересматривать без содрогания.

Из всех этих позиций необходимо выйти, и это можно сделать только в рамках академического рассмотрения. И из такого рассмотрения ситуации вокруг ДАУ следует несколько выводов разного удельного веса. Первый и самый главный – в том, что феминистки правы: в новом мире возросла чувствительность к насилию, задача искусства – трансформировать мир, и отлично, что мы больше не хотим мириться с частями не трансформированного старого мира, где позиция гения совпадала с позицией абьюзера, насильника и манипулятора. Это, что называется, моя официальная позиция.

Дальнейшие выводы полностью противоречат этому. То есть: “Феминистки правы, но”. Феминистский взгляд на ДАУ погружает нас в пространство мифа, в бесконечные подвалы замка Синей Бороды. Якобы есть чудовищный насильник – в данном случае на эту роль выбран режиссер Хржановский – и красавицы-жертвы. Чтобы выбраться из этой мифологической картины, необходим свободный анализ. Кроме того, само искусство свободно и небезобидно. Искусство небезобидно и никому не должно рассказывать только про пушистых зайчиков, – но и реальные зайчики не должны страдать. В том смысле, что нам не все равно, когда на съемках плачут дети из детдома, за которых некому заступиться. Может быть, даже все мы, жители Восточной Европы и России, оказываемся такими “детьми из детдома”, за которых некому заступиться, не осознающими, что над ними осуществляется насилие. Но искусство все равно имеет право показывать все что угодно.

Ну а теперь – после стольких оговорок, когда пришлось говорить об очевидных вещах, – все же хотелось бы осмыслить это произведение.

Часто говорят, что режиссер создал на съемках “пространство тоталитаризма”. На мой взгляд, это ничего не объясняет. На мой взгляд, объяснение здесь должно быть совсем другим. Проект ДАУ – не тоталитарный. Есть наука под названием “философская антропология”, и есть определенный антропологический тип – тип феодала. ДАУ – это феодальный по способу производства проект.

Французский философ Жорж Батай в 1965 году публикует работу, посвященную Жилю де Ре [Gilles de Rais] – человеку, чьи преступления пережили не только свою эпоху, но и все последующие. Возможно, на свете не было преступников, способных сравниться с ним по масштабу, по степени чудовищности насилия, по размаху, по антуражу, по количеству жертв. Именно фигура Жиля де Рэ стала прототипом сказок о Синей Бороде. Он был бароном, маршалом Франции, участвовал в Столетней войне, воюя бок о бок с Жанной д’Арк, и серийным убийцей, расчленявшим детей и насиловавшим их. Речь идет о сотнях жертв. Жиль де Ре был предан суду и казнен 26 октября 1440 года. Достоверность этих обвинений установить в силу срока давности затруднительно, и она постоянно оспаривается, но, как пишет в послесловии к сделанному им русскому переводу философ Иван Болдырев, “Батай был прав, говоря о том, что документы процесса – уникальное свидетельство той эпохи” (Батай 2008: 297).

В тексте, посвященном Жилю де Ре, “священному монстру”, Батай по документам о суде над Жилем де Ре воссоздает картину его преступлений и искупления (опираясь на “перевод” на современный французский язык судебных документов XV в., осуществленный Пьером Клоссовски). В принципе, Батай был близок к выводу о том, что это не Жиль де Ре убивал – но им убивало то время, в которое он жил.

Батай считает исторический период главным условием возникновения Жиля де Ре и ему подобных. Философ связывает поведение своего героя с тем, что все происходит в момент перехода феодализма в буржуазный строй: феодал-сумасброд, каким был Жиль де Ре, является для него, как сказали бы в СССР, “осколком феодализма”.

Феодалы, подобные де Ре, любили пышную “видимость”. Батай, например, сообщает: “По случаю «дворцового выезда» в Лимузене рыцарь XII века усыпал серебром вспаханную землю; другой, дабы ответить на этот вызов, приказывал готовить еду на своей кухне при помощи восковых свечей; третий «из бахвальства» сжег живьем всех своих лошадей. Сегодня мы знаем, что означает это бахвальство, столь тесно связанное с необъяснимыми растратами сира де Рэ”, – пишет Батай, намекая, очевидно, на сексуальную природу этого бахвальства (там же: 47). Жаль, впрочем, что он никак не проясняет свой намек.

Механизм, действующий в истории Жиля де Ре и интересующий Батая, это потлач, открытие которого в 1925-м году Марселем Моссом (Мосс 2011) в общественных процессах совпало с практически одновременно открытым Фрейдом влечением к смерти (Фрейд 1992) в каждой индивидуальной психике. Сотни ничем не мотивированных, бессмысленных, загадочных убийств детей (детей как убийств потенциальностей, или самого будущего времени), равно как и растрата Жилем де Ре всего своего громаднейшего состояния, привлекают его внимание.

Я позволю себе провести несколько параллелей между фигурой Жиля де Ре и способом производства кинопроекта ДАУ.

Что роднит эти два проекта – ДАУ и жизненный ‘проект’, если его так можно назвать, Жиля де Ре?

Это, во-первых, любовь к пышным театральным постановкам, и, во-вторых, растрата. Феноменальная, колоссальная, немыслимая растрата, трата ‘в никуда’, в воздух. Представляется, что проект ДАУ – это также потлач. У режиссера были почти не ограниченные финансовые возможности во время съемок, в обращении с актерами и сотрудниками съемочной площадки его также никто не стеснял и не контролировал; для съемок был построен целый город, “институт”.

Но ДАУ – не просто потлач, он – попытка что-то создать: создать какую-то очень мимолетную вещь (в принципе, кино всегда является такой вещью, не только в случае с ДАУ: миллионы тратятся на то, чтобы получить игру света и тени на пленке). У ДАУ другая цель, чем укрепление связей между соседними племенами или власть. ДАУ – это алхимический потлач.

Второе сходство: у Жиля де Ре была навязчивая идея. Он хотел увидеть Дьявола. Когда я смотрела фильмы проекта ДАУ, я смотрела их под этим углом: как – выдуманную, разумеется, мной, – попытку режиссера увидеть настоящего дьявола: где он? В этой сцене или в той, с женщинами, с детьми или с КГБ?

По Батаю, попытки Жиля де Ре установить связь с Дьяволом являются оборотной стороной набожности. Батай строит повествование на контрастах, обнаруженных им в “священном монстре”. “Священным” монстра делает как раз причастность к осуществлению древнего культа, к жертвоприношению, и наличие ‘идеальной’ или даже сентиментальной части личности: Жиль де Ре любит церковные песнопения, планирует покаяться у гроба господня в Иерусалиме; будучи изгнан во время судебного процесса из лона церкви, он просится обратно (и, кстати, получает желаемое повторное воцерковление).

У Жиля де Ре в итоге ничего не получилось. Сколько бы он ни звал алхимиков, чтобы они показали ему настоящего Дьявола, сколько бы они ни заклинали Дьявола, Жиль де Ре его так и не увидел. Можно сказать, что у Жиля де Ре к Дьяволу была неразделенная любовь.

У Батая Жиль де Ре предстает послом первобытного, архаичного мира, – мира, в котором еще живы религиозные механизмы, то есть жертвоприношение и трансгрессия. “Такой человек, как Жиль де Рэ, лишь в одиночку мог олицетворять жизнь первобытного мира, которая благородному сословию XII века была еще очень близка”, – говорит Батай (2008: 47), видя в нем, в сущности, себя: философа, случайно сохранившего остаток (и избыток) архаичных, первобытных сил в новом математизированном мире науки и техники. Тот “первобытный” мир, к которому отсылает нас Батай, исчез еще раньше феодального, либо никогда не существовал, а был выдуман антропологами, Леви-Строссом (2001).

Жиль де Ре не находит себе места в наступающем новом скучном буржуазном мире разумного хозяйствования, зачатков индустриализации и сбережений: “Игра безумных растрат больше не интересовала феодалов, равных Рэ. Она казалась им смешной. Она принадлежала миру, находившемуся на грани исчезновения. Лицом к лицу сошлись в этой игре города, соревнуясь в высоте своих соборов. Но в XV веке общество подверглось глубоким преобразованиям, и реальность уже стала важнее видимости”, – пишет Батай (там же).

У Батая Жиль де Ре – трагический преступник, шекспировский герой, инфантильный Фауст. Батай почти очарован им – но на самом деле использует фигуру Жиля для того, чтобы понять и прояснить суть христианства как машины по производству греха и искупления. Обнажив этот механизм, Батай заявляет: без греха не будет искупления, без искупления нет христианства. Это механизм, в котором обе части – грех и искупление – взаимообусловлены. Более того, ‘распутство’ Жиля де Ре, по Батаю, не просто не противоположно, а абсолютно необходимо христианству: “[...] христианство даже требует преступления, требует ужасов, которые ему в некотором смысле необходимы. Христианство должно иметь возможность миловать грешников” (там же: 12).

Механизм преступления и искупления, “искупительной жертвы”, по Батаю, лежит в основании христианства. Излишне говорить, что в нашем сегодняшнем мире нет ни того, ни другого: ни греха, ни искупления. Точнее, грехи есть, а вот искупления нет: налицо преступление без наказания. Думается, Батай хотел придумать современную религию, вернув ей первобытность и архаику, чтобы как-то сбалансировать эту очевидно несимметричную схему. Мы видим другие такие ‘преступления без наказания’ во многих современных дискурсах: постколониальном, левом, феминистском. Искупят ли страны-колонизаторы свои ‘грехи’ перед бывшими колониями? Искупит ли когда-нибудь просвещенное европейское человечество преступления нацизма? Искупит ли род мужской свои ‘грехи’ перед женщинами и детьми? И т.д.

В применении к ДАУ этот же, основной вопрос, вопрос искупления, звучит так: искупают ли достижения Советского Союза его грехи?

Остановимся в этом описании на другом сходстве, позволяющем провести параллель между двумя странными занятиями – преступлениями Жиля де Ре в пространстве ничем не ограниченной власти и кинематографическим проектом ДАУ. Подчеркнем здесь еще раз, что сходство – чисто умозрительное, не буквальное, это ни в коем случае не отождествление этих двух явлений. Скорее Жиль де Ре служит подходящей метафорой для осмысления некоторых аспектов проекта ДАУ. И вот еще один аспект – одноразовость.

В описаниях преступлений Жиля де Ре из хроник судебных процессов над ним бросается в глаза одна деталь: он совершал убийство и изнасилование каждого ребенка только один раз, после чего выбрасывал их тела в помойную яму. Это было убийство, не отделенное от изнасилования; секс, не отделенный от смерти; любовь, не отделимую от ненависти, которую, возможно, Жиль испытывал к своим родителям, которые оба рано умерли, отец покинул его в год, когда ему исполнилось одиннадцать лет – все его жертвы впоследствии были примерно этого возраста; мы можем и должны предположить, что год, когда он потерял сначала мать, а затем отца, год формирования сексуальности, предопределил эту смертельную слитость и неразличенность агрессии и желания, себя и Другого, слитость полов – жертвами Жиля были как мальчики, так и девочки, влагалищам которых не было отведено никакой особенной роли в его однообразных постановках…

Итак, он совершал ‘убийствоизнасилование’ каждого ребенка только один раз. Это были ‘одноразовые мальчики’, отрезанные головы которых он коллекционировал, и даже разговаривал с ними, – то есть, мы могли бы предположить, что здесь наличествует садистическое аналитическое усилие, попытка преодоления кастрационной тревоги, попытка отделить что-то от чего-то: телесный верх от низа, мать от отца, ангельскую красоту многих детей, о которой специально упоминается, от безобразия/комизма их внутренностей во вспоротых животах. Над внутренностями Жиль смеялся. Вероятно, это было что-то низкое, тайное – в противоположность их ангельским головам. В терминах философии Жиля Делеза это можно было бы назвать “божественной дизъюнкцией”⁸.

Потребность найти что-то тайное и ‘низкое’ прослеживается и в проекте ДАУ, который, в сущности, является насмешкой над советским проектом, пародией на его возвышенные смыслы. Может быть, поэтому советские ученые в фильме ДАУ. Наташа ведут эксперименты с оргоном Вильгельма Райха – выстроенный специально для съемок железный объект вроде как должен обладать волшебными свойствами; но в это время ссорятся пьяные буфетчицы, происходят беспорядочные половые связи, КГБ в застенках пытает невинных жертв…

Интересно, что ту же ‘одноразовость’ удается обнаружить в материалах дела в отношении другого увлечения Жиля де Ре – театра.

Жиль де Ре был помешан на пышных театрализованных процессиях. Батай обращает внимание на то, что в театральных шествиях и представлениях, которые устраивал наш мот-феодал, специально пошитые к случаю пышные наряды должны были использоваться только один раз. Как будто нечто однажды уже реализованное, случившееся, тут же теряло свою ценность, становилось плохим, испорченным, мертвым; все увиденное им обращалось в тлен и прах, и даже хуже – в фекалии. В описании Батая Жиль де Ре предстает расточительным как в отношении своего гигантского состояния, так и в убийствах 800 детей (да, число его жертв сравнимо с числом жертв цунами). И здесь, и там, и на войне, где он резал ‘врагов Франции’ вместе с Жанной Д-Арк, Жиль де Ре предстает загадочно, мистически непрактичным. Он обращал все, на что падал его заинтересованный взгляд, в пустоту.

Именно эту расточительность Батай изучает на протяжении всей книги; целеполагание такой непрактичности – это его главный вопрос. Его поражает широта души убийцы, устроившего вихрь по переводу тел и душ детей в потустороннее ничто; жертвы, сожженные в камине прислужниками, посредством дымохода оказывались прямо в “небесной сини” (Батай 1999). Эта одноразовость подчеркивает определенного рода бахвальство, мотовство или щедрость.

Параллель здесь прямая: вся инженерия ДАУ выстроена ради фильма и разрушается вместе с ним; разбираются декорации, проходят премьеры, утихают скандалы… Представляется, что во всем этом проекте все же была какая-то тайная цель и, если у ДАУ как проекта есть своя философия, то ее также следует искать у Батая: “Накопленные богатства ценны лишь во вторую очередь, а растраченные или уничтоженные, – в глазах тех, кто их расточает или уничтожает, – обладают суверенной ценностью: они не служат ничему другому, – лишь самому этому расточению или разрушению, которое завораживает” (Батай 2008: 47).

Батай здесь постулирует растрату как последнее основание бытия, суверенность или субстанциальность – как восхождение к субстанции бытия-желания, расположенной, согласно Гегелю, Батаю и Лакану, в небытии. Из всех благ или из всего тлена эпохи – власти, денег, десятков тысяч акров земельных владений – Жиль де Ре выбирает только собственное наслаждение, ставя его превыше всех законов Вселенной; реальность, о которой он говорит на суде – стоит и “десяти тысяч” жертв. Это его собственная психическая реальность, которую позже откроет Фрейд.

Не такова ли и реальность кино, не в той же ли фундаментальной растрате ее ценность? Не одна ли и та же радикальная негативная по отношению к существующему миру позиция руководит и Жилем де Ре, и Хржановским?

Если смотреть глазами Батая, то есть из Франции ХХ века, то Жиль де Ре предстает фигурой где-то даже революционной, антикапиталистической. Его растрата бросает вызов существующему миропорядку, в котором, пишет Батай, “мы заняты накоплением богатств, рассчитывая на их постоянный прирост” (там же: 47). Он отождествляет этот прирост богатства с трудом, свойственным низшим сословиям, а растрату и потлач – с игрой, самоценной вещью, не служащей ничему другому; мгновению, “расточению, разрушению, которое завораживает” (там же). Льются реки денег, льется кровь из горла невинной жертвы – Жиль де Ре любил на это смотреть. Кажется, очарованный растратой, Батай позволяет себе на время забыть о слезах жертв и их матерей; как если бы нужно было забыть, чтобы лучше понять.

Батай как-то вскользь упоминает Холокост: “Поступки Жиля и его деда заставляют вспомнить о жестокостях нацистов”, – пишет он (там же: 14). Он обрывает мысль в конце главы, переходя в следующей к описанию взросления человеческого чудовища и отличиям его от его преступника-дедушки. Но ведь можно сказать, что любая большая война – это гигантская растрата, потлач. И тогда реальная завороженность Жилем де Ре Батая, пишущего работу о нем в конце 1950-х, – это завороженность Шоа. Его задача в этой работе – обнажить машину, некое устройство сознания-социума, которая в западной цивилизации привела человечество в XX веке вовсе не к торжеству христианских ценностей, но к нескольким мировым войнам и бессчетным геноцидам.

Похожую задачу ставит себе и режиссер ДАУ, только объект его рассмотрения – не преступления нацистов, а пространство советского. Судить о том, насколько это удалось, предоставим кинокритикам, которые обычно не обходят эту тему стороной.

Елена Костылева
Центр практической философии Стасис
Европейского университета в Санкт-Петербурге
ekostyleva@eu.spb.ru

Против опыта. ДАУ и феминистская критика

Что такое ДАУ? Набор фильмов? Сериал? Тотальная инсталляция, пару лет назад занявшая один из парижских театров? Или же, скорее, сам процесс его производства, погрузивший тысячи непрофессиональных людей в жесткую, потенциально небезопасную и полную неизвестности среду проекта? Машина производства радикального опыта, интерпретируемая некоторыми феминистскими критикессами, одним из главных рупоров которой стал проект Кимкибабадук (Кувшинова 2020), как машина централизованного насилия, созданная Ильёй Хржановским?

Это далеко не первый эксперимент подобного рода – погружение в опасное неизвестное было частью художественного метода и для Вернера Херцога: в ходе съемок фильмов Fitzcarraldo / Фицкарральдо (1982, ФРГ, Перу) и Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes / Агирре, гнев божий (1972, ФРГ) непрофессиональные и профессиональные актёры и индейцы Амазонии сталкивались на съемочной площадке в тяжелых условиях сельвы. Можно вспомнить и современные проекты Яна Фабра: в спектакле Mount Olympus / Гора Олимп (2016), где актёры проживали на сцене 24 часа интенсивной и насыщенной жизни, и фильм Артура Аристакисяна Место на земле (2001, Россия), действие которого на протяжении четырех лет снималось в московском сквоте на Остоженке 20, само существование которого ‘охранялось’ именно фактом съемок там фильма.

В ещё более радикальной форме вопрос о столкновении с неизвестным был поставлен искусством художественной интервенции, в котором галерейное и даже внегалерейное пространство переставало быть безопасной зоной – напротив, становилось территорией вторжения и всякого рода ‘хулиганства’. Именно с открытой позиции ‘хулигана’ действовал центральный деятель московского акционизма 1990-х Александр Бренер. “Никогда я не был ни художником, ни писателем. И не буду. От этого мне приятно, легко. А бывает, что и нелегко. Но мне весело думать, что я – хулиган!” – писал он в Житиях убиенных художников (Бренер 2017).

Эта традиция трансформации декораторской, оформительской функции искусства в прямое действие, работающее с людьми и ситуацией, как с особого рода материалом лежит в основе не только искусства последних полутора столетий. Стратегия ‘скандала’, оказалась в центре художественного действия с самого момента эмансипации искусства от воли конкретного заказчика, с момента начала продвижения ‘художественного товара’ на символическом и реальном рынке на выставках “Союза Независимых” и достигла своей высшей точки в деятельности ‘протодадаиста’ боксёра и хулигана Артюра Кравана.

“Если театр действительно хочет снова стать необходимым, он должен дать нам все то, что можно найти в любви, в преступлении, в войне или в безумии”, – писал Антонен Арто в эссе Театр и жестокость (1993: 93). В эссе, заложившем основания немалой части театрального и перформативного искусства ХХ века, стратегия скандала, трансгрессии освобождается от своей ‘рыночной компоненты’ и становится элементом освобождения человека, в геймифицированной форме познающего окружающий мир. Ей следует и Илья Хржановский, но если вплоть до 2010-х годов трансгрессии и искусству прямого действия оппонировали, главным образом, консерваторы, то сегодня к ним присоединились и сторонники нарождающегося леволиберального status quo, целью которого оказывается не попытка научить нас проживать самые разные формы экстремального опыта, но попытка ‘отменить их’, полностью исключить из жизни, превращённой в утопию безопасности и заботы.

Однако исключение радикального опыта из искусства означает, по сути, исключение права на любой выбор чуть более значимый нежели выбор между лимонным и шоколадным пирогом: ведь даже управляемая, геймифицированная реальность слишком опасна. Политики идентичности, декларирующие ценность “личного опыта”, на практике оказываются направлены на то, чтобы не дать возможности столкнуться и провзаимодействовать с ним иначе, кроме как в отчужденном и крайне аккуратном описании. Здесь можно вспомнить о скандале с фильмом Girl / Девочка (Lukas Dhont, 2018, Бельгия, Нидерланды), достаточно аккуратно отображающем многие из проблем транс*телесности и балетной телесности, тем не менее именно эта аккуратность и стала причиной возмущения многих транс* и квир*-активистов, желающих избежать амплификации травмы и опасности (Серое Фиолетовое 2019).

Погружая людей в смоделированную атмосферу власти, Илья Хржановский отказывается быть оформителем, декоратором тех или иных лозунгов, но создаёт поле в котором оказывается возможным вскрытие механизмов властного контроля, приближаясь тем самым к категории “политического искусства”, как её понимает акционист Пётр Павленский в манифесте Искусство о политике и политическое искусство:

Итак, “искусство о политике” заинтересовано в компиляции внешних частей политического фасада и использует для этого различную государственную атрибутику и символы власти, в то время как “политическое искусство” нацелено работает с выявлением механизмов властного контроля и стремится к деструкции процессов манипуляции общественными отношениями.⁹

Борьба с радикальным опытом скрывает в себе борьбу с неизвестностью и полный отказ от опасности: с этой точки зрения человек не имеет право на погружение себя в неизвестную ситуацию, ведь он не может предсказать, что с ним произойдет, а значит и не может дать добровольного, осознанного согласия, свободного от физического, экономического, психологического и иного принуждения. Требуя внимания к опыту, феминистская критика ДАУ исключает самую возможность прямого чувственного взаимодействия с ним, даже в заведомо игровой форме, дающей нам возможность воспринять и столкнуться с тем, с чем мы не сталкивались – помыслить это и, быть может, научиться этому противодействовать.

Более того, все люди, его испытавшие, заведомо объявляются жертвами, мнение которых оказывается частично или полностью девальвировано. Так, например, несмотря на многочисленные опровержения, исходящие от Натальи Бережной, главной героини фильма Дау. Наташа активист_ки не устают заявлять о её изнасиловании на съемках фильма. Они тиражируют и смакуют подробности проникновения бутылки в её вагину и, цитируя приписанное Илье Хржановскому высказывание журналиста Le Monde, начисто игнорируют её собственный взгляд на ситуацию.

— Получили ли вы эмоциональную травму на съемках Дау?

— В чем они травму увидели — я понять не могу. Я живой, нормальный, обычный человек, я адекватна. Странные эти люди, которые пытаются себе что-то придумывать,

отвечает Наталья Бережная на вопросы журнала Искусство кино (Беликов 2020).

Аналогичным образом виктимизируются и участвовавшие в съёмках аутичные люди – активистская травля уже привела к уходу Любови Аркус, учредительницы журнала Сеанс и благотворительного фонда Антон тут рядом с поста президента обеих институций.¹⁰ Ситуация до боли похожа на дебаты вокруг секс-работы: немалая часть феминистского мейнстрима настаивает на криминализации клиента, не обращая никакого внимания на позицию организаций секс-работниц.

При этом исключение опасности из жизни означает, прежде всего, исключение возможности с ней справляться, не прибегая к помощи уполномоченных институций – ведь её сокрытие не ведет к её исчезновению! Что же это как не триумф секуритарной политики, приводящей, прежде всего, к диктатуре уполномоченных осуществлять исключение источников угрозы.

Это форма скрытого выстраивания иерархий заботы, сведения субъекта до определенной идентичности и использования её в собственных политических целях. Своё право на субъектность нередко проще отстоять перед умеренным ксенофобом, видящим в тебе субъекта, как только ты можешь оказаться для него равным противником или союзником, чем перед левым активистом, видящим в тебе “опекаемое домашнее животное”.

Белые либералы достигли совершенства в искусстве продажи себя черным, в качестве “друзей”, чтобы получить наши симпатии, нашу верность и наши умы. Белые либералы пытаются политически использовать нас против белых консерваторов, таким образом, что то, что делают черные никогда не оказывается в его собственных интересах – он всего лишь пешка в руках белого либерала,

заявлял Малькольм X, лидер Черных Пантер.¹¹ Мой опыт небинарной транс*персоны и, в один из периодов жизни, политической беженки лишь подтверждает его слова.

Авдей Тер-Оганян обнажил эту политику инфантилизирующего исключения, проведя акцию Бомжи на правозащитной выставке. 21 мая 1998 года в Сахаровском центре проходила выставка Права человека под кураторством Марата Гельмана. На ней желающим раздавали “паспорта” с эмблемой ООН и всеобщей декларацией прав человека внутри. Однако, правозащитники возражали против проекта, а предложение Авдея Тер-Оганяна пригласить на выставку бездомных – реально лишённых прав людей – и выдать им документы о правах, было отвергнуто всеми организаторами. Авдей вспоминает:

Я сразу скептически отнесся к этому фарсу. Легко было представить, что там будет. Я хотел показать тупое ханжество такой правозащиты и решил [в качестве собственного художественного проекта – Запрещенное искусство) привести бомжей с вокзала. Очевидно, что бомжи и есть те самые люди, которые лишены всех прав. Мероприятие было открытое, никаких пригласительных не требовалось.

Я поехал на площадь “трех вокзалов” и позвал с собой человек восемь местных, пообещав, что на вернисаже им дадут водки, а главные правозащитники защитят их права. Двинулись к метро, но парни говорят – не, нам в метро нельзя, нас туда не пускают. Пришлось долго ехать на троллейбусе.

Пришли к музею. Но охранники бомжей на выставку не пускают. “Ты проходи, а этим – нельзя”. Я пошел к начальству, скандалил, стыдил их, ловил “Митьков” – “вы должны добиться разрешения!”. Бесполезно.

Бомжи не были удивлены: “Да какие, на хуй, права человека!”. Потом “Митьки” вынесли ребятам по бутылке водки. Их сфотографировали и выдали “паспорта”. Но и с этими паспортами внутрь не пускали! Было абсолютно понятно, что этими бумажками можно только жопу подтереть.¹²

Пожалуй, сложно подобрать более яркую иллюстрацию того, как декларируемая “защита прав человека” обращается в наполненную исключением противоположность самой себе.

Неограниченное стремление к безопасности и страх перед насилием неизбежно порождает централизацию насилия и возможность его произвольного применения и противоречит самой природе биологической жизни. Ведь мы – конечные существа, вписанные в биосферу, существующую благодаря непрерывной опасности – бесконечному циклу жизни и смерти. Мы – и часть физического мира, в котором наши тела и даже технические приспособления оказываются действующими лишь в весьма ограниченном спектре условий, каждая попытка расширения которого выводит нас из “безопасной зоны”.

Именно этот выход из безопасных зон, непрерывное, но геймифицированное столкновение с реальностями неограниченной власти, подстерегающей нас везде, и попытался смоделировать Илья Хржановский, давая возможность почувствовать их и задуматься о стратегиях противостояния и взаимодействия. Борясь со сталинизмом съемочной площадки, призывая к забвению тоталитарного опыта, мы не уничтожаем тоталитаризм, но создаём новые возможности для его незаметного, невидимого возвращения.

Наше общество, наша публичность и даже наша интимность – это столкновение непохожих, неизвестных и небезопасных друг для друга субъектностей. Наша задача не исключать “опасное”, а вместе с ним и саму жизнь, но учиться бороться, защищаться и разговаривать друг с другом – в диалогах и противостояниях, которые всегда были и будут далеки от безопасности и комфорта. Защищаться и бороться, не отрицая своего противника, но уважая его достоинство и его право на собственную правду, возможно, несводимую к нашей и даже несоизмеримую с ней.

Серое Фиолетовое
анархист_ка, перформер_ка, поэт_ка

Note of a Producer

This is my note as a producer. My homage to the team I have spent twelve years with. A letter of admiration to all the participants. Last, but not least, a tribute to the most ambitious and honest art project of all time, and to its extraordinary director, Ilya Khrzhanovskiy.

DAU is the most intriguing and bizarre project ever conceived, with the myth around DAU being even greater than the project itself. Taking into account the fact that the project consists of at least fifteen feature films and 700 hours of unedited filmed material (the so-called DAU. Digital), the myth is indeed quite overwhelming. The enigma is so strong and persuasive that it makes my word as an executive producer sound as if it’s not truthful enough… that’s how I usually feel at dinner parties with new people. This makes me wonder why the viewer, and those who have only ever heard of DAU second-hand, simply take it at face value, as some sort of bizarre and distorted version of ‘reality’, as opposed to a ‘constructed fictional world’ with its own specific rules. What artistic devices are deployed within this framework to create such an immersive reality? What blurs the line between reality and fiction? And how, ultimately, does DAU create a new cinematic language that leaves the viewer utterly lost in their contemplation of reality, to the extent of even making absurd statements, sometimes so ridiculous that they turn into a dangerous play for the creators of the project, as it was with DAU. Degeneration and the ‘babies scene’ when an absurd accusation was made about “torturing” children on set. An accusation so crazy, I could not even comprehend what those accusing us would think of the crew who were filming at that moment: a group of evil people who consciously decide to go and torture innocent babies? Just pause for a second and imagine: here is our daily meeting of the department heads with the director, and we discuss torturing children? Why would any sane adult even consider such a mad assumption?

There are a few artistic devices that were used throughout the project to blur already elusive lines, leaving it completely up to the viewer to draw conclusions. None of these are individually distinctive to DAU, yet combined they create the project’s unique atmosphere. The practice of ‘typage’ (типаж) has been deployed in cinema before, starting with Vsevolod Pudovkin, who first coined the term, and more recently in such films as The Florida Project (2017, dir. Sean Baker) and The Rider (2018, dir. Chloe Zhao). The main difference with DAU is that while it worked with non-professional actors (with the exception of Radmila Schegoleva as Nora in DAU. Nora Mother) its ‘tipazh’ criteria was primarily based on personality. The question, however, is what makes an actress; and, according to a similar line of thinking, what makes an object a work of art. Perceiving an object as an artwork “is like going from the realm of mere things to a realm of meaning” (Danto 1981). One can draw a similar parallel with what constitutes an actress or actor. Is it an acting school diploma that serves as a credible confirmation of one’s acting skills? Or the very presence of a script? Or the fact that a director selected this person and attributed the necessary qualities? Furthermore, what turns a non-actor into an actor on screen? I would suggest it is one’s understanding of the frame rules and a willingness to support them. Natasha Berezhnaya does not have an acting diploma but is clearly a very talented actress. So talented that even the institutional embodiment of European cinema, the European Film Academy, nominated her for “best actress” in 2020. And yet, the most common question asked of Natasha since DAU. Natasha’s release is about the ‘realness’ of rape in the interrogation scene. The scene, and the film as a whole, outraged the Russian feminist community, which accused the creators of abuse and exploitation of the non-actress. Again, as with the scene with babies in DAU. Degeneration, the community took the scene at face value. Although the infamous ‘bottle scene’ shows no actual penetration of the bottle, and was one of the most prepped and constructed scenes we filmed, it is emotionally so tense, as is the whole film, that it seems to leave the viewer with no choice but to put the tag ‘real’ on it. Yet why? There is an element of colonial thinking in perceiving it as ‘real’, and in so doing belittling the non-actress: if you are not a professional actress, you cannot consciously live through various emotional states and perform compassionately, especially when you improvise in the situation, rather than perform a script.

Speaking of the authentic emotional reactions on screen, one might notice that there is a thin line between a conscious performance and an authentic explorative journey. The viewers’ unwillingness to face these authentic reactions is predictable. I assume it also goes very much against our basic desire to be good in the eyes of others, i.e., being accepted by others. The fundamental desire to be accepted goes hand-in-hand with our deep fear of being rejected. We unconsciously hide our ‘shadow’, speaking in Jungian terms, i.e., the unknown, dark side of our personality that is repressed. We are unwilling to discover – and prefer to reject – our ‘dark side’, or our least favourable personality traits, let alone to watch others not only embracing their shadows, but also publicly disclosing them. This makes the viewer so uncomfortable that it is easier to persuade oneself that participants were forced rather than willing to explore those darker sides of their personalities. Accepting this would lead to admiration of their bravery and potentially facing up to our own incapacity to do so. The only space where, in our day-to-day life, we would work with our dark side – and normally the safest place – is probably on the psychoanalyst’s couch. It is extremely challenging for the viewer to accept that the DAU project as a whole served as this emotionally safe place for its participants, with the whole crew working hard to create this psychologically supportive environment where participants could truly open up and freely explore themselves, by embark upon an incredibly deep journey which consists of encountering all aspects of their personality within a film set.

Being one of the participants myself (in DAU. String Theory), I can share my personal experience of the day in front of the camera. Naturally, it is quite rare for an executive producer to turn actress, which has always been my dream. Perhaps this experience was most exciting for me because it was the only day I could focus completely on myself and the part, rather than on all the complex issues a producer usually deals with on a daily basis: no crew, equipment, set, cashflow on my mind; no hundred of calls because my phone is off. I personally saw every moment of that day as a blessing, I readily accepted all the difficult and complex aspects of the scene and was gently guided when I needed help with the story development. The only thing I now regret is that I was so little in front of the camera.

The difficulty for the viewer is clear: the DAU set – the Institute – is a construction that should make the viewer feel uncomfortable. Built in a surreal way, and being a phantasmagorical projection of a Soviet institute, it nonetheless nudges the viewer to perceive it as a real Soviet institute due to numerous, and often familiar, small, authentic props. Developed by the set designer Denis Shibanov and his team, its beautiful ugliness leaves the viewer in awe. Painted with mostly glossy oil paint, it created an unusually chilly feeling. Although for the participants it was just drywall and timber, the final look on screen was substantially different. The meticulous work by the DoP Jürgen Jürges and his team turned the set into a gloomy space. As Jüerges puts it: “I tried to establish a moody atmosphere, with dark places and bright spots which never let you feel comfortable, you should never feel cosy, it always gives a latent strained feeling. In collaboration with the architect Denis Shibanov we built ‘practical lights’ and I intensified them with hundreds of small halogen spots, invisible either for the protagonists, or the cameras which created this special light, giving the images this authentic impression.”¹³ To even better achieve the artistic goals of the director, DAU’s costume department created a distinct language with thousands of costumes intensifying the discrete feel of the characters during different historical periods and enriching the visual image. The Institute is a self-contained world, and its choice of costumes emphasises its rigidity. Aleksandra Timofeeva, Liubov’ Mingazitinova, Irina Tsvetkova, Ol’ga Bekritskaia, and Elena Bekritskaia created the language that ‘spoke’ as loud as the language of the set itself.

In addition to all these elusive and deceptive features, the camera work with its documentary style mostly leaves it up to the viewer to decode the message. The viewer pointlessly waits for the usual feature-film hints: a close-up to suggest getting into the emotional state of the character; a profile as a hint that the character is being observed; a character’s point of view to provide subjective perception, and so on and so forth – all the complexity of the camera craft, which a contemporary viewer is intuitively familiar with, and the guidelines of visual perception that are normally given to the viewer as a helping hand to aid meaningful deconstruction. Yet not in DAU. Here the viewer is left alone without the usual guidebook. This makes the experience of watching both insecure and intense. Endless long and middle shots leave viewers to work out the puzzle on their own. The only way to decode, it seems, is to imagine yourself in that situation, or in relation to your own situation, and consequently achieve a highly subjective yet very real experience. It is much more tempting to contrast your own reality with someone else’s reality, rather than a fictional world, so attributes of ‘reality’ are in fact easier to describe in the DAU films.

Finally, there is ‘the pig scene’ in DAU. Degeneration, where the pig is killed on screen and the viewer sees the reaction of the horrified scientists. Violence is neither delayed nor hidden; it is happening in real time. Everyday, millions of pigs are slaughtered around the world before they enter numerous dining rooms as pork chops. Yet we do not see, and clearly prefer not to see, the violence required. Meat producers try to make meat look as innate as possible. Nothing in a carefully cut piece of meat resembles a real animal; the consumer would not buy this piece of meat otherwise. We like to believe that we are not cruel, and yet industrial agriculture is one of the world’s biggest environmental hazards. This scene exposes our hypocrisy to an unbearable extent, leaving no space for the viewer to hide. DAU yet again forces you to face yourself and explore your dark side, to live with your shadow, overcome it, and hopefully feel reborn. This is both the power and the main weapon of DAU – the fictional world that has blurred lines, that leaves the viewer always wondering where reality is skilfully mixed with fiction, where performance is juxtaposed with real emotion and where carefully constructed fictional scenes (such as the one with the babies in a ​​medical experiment and the interrogation scene, to name just a few) are mingled with spontaneous acting and performing acts.

Watching DAU is an act of high cognitive performance on the part of the viewer, and I would like readers to take from this note that DAU has always been about love. As we all know, it’s probably only love that can help us accept ourselves as we are, holistically, in full. Only love can help us empathise. DAU is your individual path to love, compassion, and acceptance.

Svetlana Dragaeva
Executive Producer
Phenomen Films
svetlana@phenomenfilms.com

On the Architecture of DAU: Capitalist Realism, Logical Conclusionism and Underpant Determinism

In my trawl through a decade’s worth of commentary, gossip, and news written about DAU in multiple languages, I have been guided and assisted by two factors.

First, by the fact that I am focusing on the architecture and set-design of the project, as conceived (in consultation with Ilya Khrzhanovskiy) by the otherwise almost entirely unknown artist Denis Shibanov. Shibanov designed every aspect of the set of the DAU project in Kharkiv, as well as the DAU project’s 2018 and 2019 releases in Berlin and Paris, and some elements of the interiors of 100 Piccadilly, the project’s long-term HQ in London. To date, hardly anything has been written about Shibanov and his work on DAU in English – although a fair amount of information and some interviews are available in Russian.

Second, my reading is quite possibly overdetermined (if the Pavlovian / Marxian / Stanislavskian determinist environmental design of Khrzhanovskiy and Shibanov indeed functions as it is intended to function) by the impression I formed during my visits to 100 Piccadilly in the summer of 2019.

I have organised my notes and/or impressions about DAU into a tentative and overlapping typology of categories (Fig. 3). I won’t go into the detail of each of these categories in my analysis, but I will refer to some of them, in particular: the terrain of toxic masculinity; underpant determinism; communist plenty; logical conclusionism; and capitalist realism.

My visit to 100 Piccadilly was very underwhelming. This is the word I remember writing down at the time; and it is perhaps notable that Eugénie Zvonkine also used it in her description of the Paris exhibition (Zvonkine 2019). The underwhelmingness was compounded, I think, by the fact that this interior had clearly been in place already for a decade or so, and had not been refreshed. In fact, everything looked much as it did in the footage from the Paris event, but worse. The carpet exuded a slightly dank odour. The poor-quality wax figurines were faded and dirty. The frameless Soviet poster reproductions were dog-eared.

In keeping with Category 3 of my typology, there was also a tattered old hanging poster of the female internal sexual organs, which was not even Soviet and, for that reason, somehow all the more strikingly gratuitous. There were also taxidermy fragments of animals, mostly pigs. After I watched the pig getting killed by Maksim Martsinkevich and his neo-Nazi companions at the end of DAU. Degeneration (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Ilya Permyakov), I was treated to a meal at the in-house “stolovaia”. I think it consisted of pelmeni, mors, and vodka. As I ate my pork dumplings, I stared at the disembodied roaring boar’s head in the middle of the table and I think perhaps it was supposed to provoke some sort of unpleasant Pavlovian response. I lay out a few more observations and interpretations of the DAU films below, relating to the categories from Fig. 1.

Plenty: The Soviet Union without Shortages

Throughout the DAU movies I have seen – for the record, these are Novyi chelovek, a shortened cut of Degeneratsiia / Degeneration, Tri dnia / Three Days (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Jekaterina Oertel), and Smelye liudi / Brave People (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Aleksei Sliusarchuk) – there is a cornucopia of food and booze. Not just vodka and sausage, but also grapes and brandy and champagne. This plenty features at all levels of the hierarchy, from Landau’s apartment to the buffet. So, why is there so much plenty in DAU? Why is there so much food and booze readily available, all the time, streams and streams of it? The food flows as easily as the blood and the semen.

This reminds me of a recurring quasi-ironic theme in contemporary Russian culture, which is about the reconstruction of the USSR, but better and cleaner, and more successful than it ever was before. This is the theme behind the ongoing ‘blagoustroistvo’ or reconstruction of VDNKh, the Stalin-era exhibition ground in north Moscow, which is currently being restored to a gentrified fantasy of Stalinist perfection (Schönle 2020). This is also the theme which – arguably – is satirised in the mass-market 2006 Iulii Gusman dark comedy Park sovetskogo perioda / Park of the Soviet Period (Russia), which has regularly been invoked, in name if not in substance, in discussions about DAU. And it brings to mind, most obviously for me at least, elements in the recently-opened Kremlin-adjacent Zaryadye Park – the main subject of my current research on Moscow.

This theme is most vividly embodied in the park’s main restaurant, Voskhod (initially to be named Soiuz), whose proprietor (celebrity restaurateur Aleksandr Rappoport) and designers (the Sundukov sisters), describe its design ideology as being about creating a space which feels like “the Soviet Union, but without shortages” [“Sovetskii Soiuz no bez defitsitov”] (Murawski 2020a and 2020b).

Capitalist Realism

The above also calls to a mind a kind of twisted version of socialist realism, which can be called “capitalist realism”, in a merger of the concepts proposed by the philosopher Mark Fisher (Fisher 2009); and, some years before Fisher, by the architectural critics Bart Goldhoorn and Philip Meuser in their book about post-Soviet architecture (Goldhoorn, Meuser 2006) whereby the bombastic aesthetic of socialist realism is retained but repurposed for functioning in a commodity economy, reinforcing in the process the sense of the current order’s eternality and immutability.

This also pertains to the next category:

Logical Conclusionism

DAU has been much ridiculed for the way in which it allegedly attempts to create a conceit of authenticity, by making extras and visitors wear Soviet underwear and eat Soviet food and spend replica Soviet money, and so on.¹⁴ It is curious, then, that – when it comes to the set design, interior too but exterior especially – this concern with authenticity dissipates; or at least morphs into something else. The grand set of DAU – created by Shibanov in the defunct open-air swimming pool of Dynamo Kharkiv, as well as in various other locations throughout the city and beyond – adds up to an absurd parody of Stalinist architecture. It all feels a bit like a Terry Gilliam movie; and – in its more thoughtful (but no less derivative) moments – like a Soviet-inspired monumental postmodern edifice of the sort built by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill in the 1980s.

It certainly does not look like anything in the Soviet Union; and it does not look like it is trying to be realistic. The set-design has been variously characterised – the BBC Russian service, for example, describes it as “exaggerated constructivism” (Kan 2019). Shibanov himself has also made numerous claims about his inspirations. In our interview, he referred to buildings in the style of what has been called “post-constructivism” – a 1930s bridging style between Constructivism and Stalinist socialist realism – as his primary inspiration.¹⁵ Elsewhere, he has referred to a sort of undead Stalinism, or Stalinism taken to its logical conclusion. As he told Kommersant journalist Oleg Kashin: “after the death of Stalin, there was a campaign against excesses in architecture […] but here, I wanted [instead] to bring superfluity to its absolute fucking limits” (Kashin 2010).

In fact, a further, unrealised film, Gorod na vysote [The City on the Heights], was to be set in a Moscow in which the Palace of the Soviets had actually been built. As Shibanov tells Komsomol’skaia Pravda: “I thought it would be really glorious, if we imagined that Stalin never died in 1953, and his favourite style in architecture had reached its apogee” (Anon. 2011).

Terrain of Toxic Masculinity

Which brings us back again to the question of the sort of relationship to sexuality and gender DAU exudes. The violence of the DAU project’s troublesome masculinity is certainly discernible, on a very explicit level, in its design ideology. The entire Institute – perhaps in some sort of crass reference to Landau’s interest in polyamory – is built, apparently, as an embodiment of the female sexual organs. One side of the Institute – the one with the long vertical openings, on the left – was named (by Shibanov himself) “vagina”; the opposite side, with rounded porthole-like openings, was known as “nipples”. Shibanov told Kashin how he longed endlessly and desirously for design inspiration, until “suddenly, in the course of one night, all of this was born in my head: first one wall, and then other wall, they formed a whole, and all the remaining buildings and structures” (Kashin 2010). Kashin adds: “Denis asked that I remove from the text his recollection of two nights of uninterrupted sex which preceded this epiphany; but without this recollection, it would be impossible for the reader to understand why the walls of the Institute have these physiological names” (ibid.).

I think it’s fair to say that a repeated tendency for male demiurges to name bits of architecture after parts of the female sexual anatomy is definitely a thing in DAU. The substance of Shibanov’s statement to Kashin is seconded by the above-mentioned anatomical chart hanging in the ‘stolovaia’ at 100 Piccadilly; and, further, by the naming conventions of the bar/stolovaia in the Paris DAU exhibition. In the words of what appears to be a male French DAU staffer, as rendered on the BBC Russian service website: “There is a secret room here, it is called ‘the vagina’, and there is like a really cool floor, a really soft floor, and you can visit it” (Kan 2019).

As the subtitles to the BBC film suggest, however, another name for the “vagina” (perhaps the official one) is “Sranaia dyra” (literally – the shithole). Quite what this double naming convention is supposed to indicate is left unexplored. Probably it is supposed to be some sort of ironic joke. But its consequences are rather disturbing, all the more so when one calls to mind the social-psychological impulse at the heart of DAU. Given the numerous rumours and accusations of sexual violence plaguing the deterministic planet of DAU, all of the above monikers and utterances take on rather unsettling resonances.

DAU Determines?

In her recent essay, Sophie Pinkham has commented on what she calls the “reductive Pavlovianism” of DAU – the filmmakers’ expectation that “the unmediated experience of ‘authentic’ Soviet commodities and brutalized personal relationships will trigger examinable reactions” (Pinkham 2020). Khrzhanovskiy’s repeated, rather banal references to the Stanford prison experiment, and to his desire to use the film to “extract” what he calls the “genotype” of the Soviet person do, I think, bolster Pinkham’s characterisation; so, too, do numerous statements by Shibanov, made in many of his Russian-language interviews and – especially vociferously – in our interview.

Pinkham also points out that the chief financier of the project is the oligarch Sergei Adonyev, co-founder (with Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas and others) of Strelka, a cutting-edge architecture and design institute. Strelka has, since its foundation in 2009, spawned a vast “consulting bureau”, carrying out (state-financed) projects of ‘blagoustroistvo’ – urban improvement or prettification – in cities all over Russia and the former USSR. The chief exemplars of the ongoing ‘blagoustroistvo’ campaign are Moscow’s Gor’kii Park (Strelka’s revival of the paradigmatic ‘park sovetskogo perioda’ was completed in 2012); and the Kremlin-abutting Zaryadye Park, opened with great fanfare by Vladimir Putin in 2017 (Murawski and Shevchenko 2017).

Now, ‘blagoustroistvo’ also has a deeply deterministic ideology at its core. This determinism manifests itself in myriad ways – one aspect of the rhetoric of ‘blagoustroistvo’ worth commenting on in this context is the use of what I call, following Anna Kruglova (2017, see also Murawski 2018), “vernacular Marxist” ideas about the relationship between human consciousness and material conditions. In particular, I have in mind the phrase “being determines consciousness” (“bytie opredeliaet soznanie”) – a quotation from Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy – which is routinely deployed in everyday discussions about ‘blagoustroistvo’.

So what is the significance of the fact that DAU (and the post-Soviet world beyond) is so peppered with these reductive cod-determinisms – Stanislavskian, Pavlovian, and Marxist? I am not going to provide a conclusive answer to this question here; and some possible routes of insight are formulated by Shibanov himself in the course of our conversation. In any case, the process of researching and writing this text has convinced me that looking more closely at the architecture of DAU allows us to make sense of some of the seeming puzzles and contradictions in the project’s ideology, and of what these puzzles and contradictions say about the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and deterministic techno-political ideologies – not only in Russia but also in the world beyond – during the first two decades of the 21^st century.

Michał Murawski
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
University College London
m.murawski@ucl.ac.uk

Bio

Keti Chukhrov is ScD in philosophy, an associate professor at the School of Philosophy & Сultural Studies at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). In 2012-2017 she was the head of the Theory and Research department at the National Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow. In 2017-2019 she has been a Marie Curie-Sklodowska Fellow in the UK, Wolverhampton University. Her latest book, Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), deals with the impact of the socialist political economy on the epistemes of historical socialism. Her full-length books include: To Be – To Perform: ‘Theatre’ in Philosophic Critique of Art (European University, 2011); Pound & £ (Logos, 1999); and a volume of dramatic writing: Merely Humans (2010). Her research interests and publications deal with philosophy of performativity, Soviet Marxist philosophy and communist epistemologies, and art as the institute of global contemporaneity.

​​Daria V. Ezerova is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. She specializes in post-Soviet and contemporary Russian cinema, and has published in the Slavic Review, Senses of Cinema, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, SEANS, and KinoKultura. She received her PhD from Yale University in 2018.

Philip Cavendish is a Reader in Russian and Soviet Film Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His main research interests lie in the relationship between film technology and visual aesthetics. He has published on the poetics of the camera in pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema, the visual aesthetics of Soviet avant-garde and mainstream cinema in the 1920s and ‘30s, the archival history and reconstructions of Sergei Eizenshtein’s first film (Glumov’s Diary), the genre of the photo-film in contemporary Russian cinema, and experiments in Soviet colour film and animation during the 1930s and 1940s. Along with Dr Rachel Morley, he is co-Chair of the Russian Cinema Research Group at UCL SSEES.

Elena Kostyleva (Елена Костылева) – поэт, писатель, философ, психоаналитик, аспирантка Центра практической философии «Стасис». Статьи и рецензии Елены Костылевой публикуются с 2000-х годов, в том числе в журналах Стасис, Новое литературное обозрение, Сеанс, на сайте colta.ru и в нескольких десятках популярных изданий. Стихотворения Костылевой переведены на английский, французский, итальянский, греческий, китайский языки. Книги Легко досталось (2000) и Лидия (2009) попали в шорт-листы Всероссийской премии «Дебют» (2000) и Премии Андрея Белого (2009), стихотворение «Советская женщина» номинировано на премию «Поэзия» в 2019 году.

Grey Violet (Серое Фиолетовое), anarchist*, text, gesture.

Svetlana Dragaeva is an Executive Producer of DAU and the Founder and CEO of Fountain Digital Labs, as well as creator of the BAFTA-winning Virry app and Virry VR series. She has degrees in cognitive linguistics, politics, cultural studies, narratology, and psychology. She has also taught film at Ohio State University.

Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His first book, The​​ Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed, was published by Indiana University Press in 2019. More information about Michał’s research and writing can be found on his website: www.michalmurawski.net

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Suggested Citation

Cavendish, Philip, Keti Chukhrov, Svetlana Dragaeva, Daria Ezerova, Elena Kostyleva, Michał Murawski and Grey Violet. 2022. “Voices II: Essays on DAU”. Soviet Playtime: Architectures of Power and Profligacy in DAU (ed. by Philip Cavendish, Natascha Drubek, and Irina Schulzki). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 14. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2022.00014.298

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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