Dau director Ilya Khrzhanovsky: my ‘pornographic propaganda’ recreating the USSR is more important than ever | Movies

In late July this yr, a number of days earlier than his fiftieth birthday, the exiled Russian film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky was landed with a 50,000 rouble (£450) high quality by the Presnensky District Court docket of Moscow. This punishment was ostensibly for a Kafkaesque administrative offence referring to “procedures for the actions of international brokers”. Khrzhanovsky himself thinks it was a symbolic birthday warning from the Russian authorities that he’s nonetheless on their radar.“It’s clear it’s absolute nonsense,” Khrzhanovsky says. “I cannot pay it. I’m not a Russian citizen and I don’t wish to pay any cash to the Russian state.” He renounced his Russian citizenship final yr, and is now a British, German and Israeli citizen.Additionally final yr, Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB agent turned politician who turned deputy chair of the State Duma Committee on Safety and Anti-Corruption, known as Khrzhanovsky a “grasp traitor”, and accused him of “sabotage in opposition to Russia”. That’s when Khrzhanovsky was first given the standing of “international agent” – a label extensively used to focus on critics of the Putin regime.Ilya Khrzhanovsky. {Photograph}: Geoffrey MacnabLugovoi particularly objected to the XZ Basis that Khrzhanovsky and journalist Mikhail Zygar arrange in 2023 to counter propaganda in Russia. Lugovoi didn’t very like Khrzhanovsky’s mocking angle towards Russia’s “particular operation” in Ukraine both.On the September afternoon that I meet him within the cafe of the tennis membership on Venice’s Lido, Lugovoi isn’t a lot on his thoughts. He’s on the town for The Quantum Impact, an exhibition on the San Marco Arts Centre (SMAC) the place he’s presenting materials from his endless venture Dau. The excerpts he’s exhibiting function scientists debating quantum and string idea.Khrzhanovsky is relaxed however exudes a sure weary fatalism. You may’t blame him, given the large money owed he has amassed since embarking on Dau, and the widespread opprobrium directed towards the venture. It’s a collection of movies – 14 options in all – artwork installations, performances, debates and books about Soviet Russia below Stalin that Khrzhanovsky began engaged on 20 years in the past.When one of many first movies to be unveiled, Dau: Natasha, screened in competitors within the Berlin movie pageant in February 2020, it received an award for its veteran German cinematographer, Jürgen Jürges, however typically induced uproar in east and west alike. The movie was promptly banned in Russia as “pornographic propaganda”. A grim late scene by which its protagonist Natasha (Natasha Berezhnaya) is being interrogated by a KGB investigator who forces her to insert the neck of a bottle into her vagina provoked specific fury, though the scene was clearly staged. The director was accused of rampant misogyny and bullying.“It was printed that I discovered Natasha inside a masochistic brothel, which is totally not true – after which it was translated to Russian,” the director complains, bitterly, about how he and his venture have been misrepresented.Fury-provoking … Natasha Berezhnaya in Dau. Natasha. {Photograph}: Phenomen FilmIt irks him that he was accused of secretly recording his actors of their most intimate moments, together with once they have been having drunken intercourse. For one factor, Dau was shot on 35mm – and you may’t assist however discover a 35mm film digicam, particularly when there’s a large crew standing behind it.The Dau venture began in modest trend, as a small, European-funded arthouse film impressed by the Nobel prize-winning Soviet scientist Lev Landau (who died in 1968). However someplace alongside the best way the venture “mutated”, as Khrzhanovsky places it. He secured assist from the oligarch Sergei Adoniev and as an alternative of constructing a function movie, he launched into what become a large multimedia experiment designed to submerge audiences – and people who participated in making it – within the horrific, phantasmagoric world of the Stalin-era Soviet Union.He labored with three cinematographers: Lol Crawley (who final yr received an Oscar for The Brutalist) shot the Saint Petersburg elements of Dau; then there have been Jürges (greatest identified for his work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and Manuel Alberto Claro (who has shot a number of Lars von Trier movies together with Nymphomaniac).The maverick director largely made the Dau movies in Kharkiv in Ukraine, the place he constructed a re-creation of a Soviet-era scientific compound that’s claimed to be the most important movie set in European cinema historical past. Rumours advised he had gone loopy, like Kurtz in Coronary heart of Darkness. He was working with huge armies of actors and extras, artists and scientists (amongst them Marina Abramović and opera director Peter Sellars), all of whom needed to keep solely in character, as in the event that they actually have been again within the USSR.In character … artist Marina Abramović in Dau. {Photograph}: TCD/Prod.DB/AlamyWhen he gave a masterclass on the Sarajevo movie pageant earlier this summer season, one element stood out: the 70 tons of cabbage he requisitioned for a single scene. After I ask why he wanted fairly so many greens, he responds: “It’s an uncommon venture and I did it in an uncommon means. I attempted to create a sense of a special time. I attempted to search out exact faces, exact physique language for characters, even within the extras …”I recognise individuals from the ex-USSR. There’s something in regards to the look of their eyes“I recognise individuals from the ex-USSR. It doesn’t matter how they gown. It’s sort of the Soviet odor. Not actually a odor, however there’s something within the physique language, one thing about how individuals look within the eyes. This was one of many causes I wished to attempt to make this film, to know the character of this Soviet DNA,” he says.A fateful choice was to not launch what he now calls the “mom movie” first. This was the standard, narrative-driven function that, judging by the trailer, was near a Physician Zhivago-style epic, full with huge crowd scenes.“I felt that if I got here first with this film, it could take all the eye, and the opposite Dau films could be similar to leftovers,” he says. As an alternative, the experimental and confrontational work, by which he goes “actually deep in human relations and behavior”, was proven to the general public first, and there was an enormous Dau exhibition on the Théâtre du Châtelet and Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in early 2019.‘The character of totalitarianism and the character of life is that you simply don’t know’ … Dau. Degeneration. {Photograph}: DauThe timing was in opposition to him. Due to Covid, distribution alternatives for the primary batch of movies have been severely curtailed. Some have been made out there on a web site (at present below reconstruction) however Dau appeared destined to show into a type of tantalising initiatives that may by no means correctly be accomplished. Again in 2019 and 2020, its grim warnings in regards to the true nature of up to date Russian totalitarianism have been largely ignored. So have been the discussions about artwork, philosophy, faith and quantum physics. As an alternative, critics centered on the intercourse and the violence, or grumbled in regards to the teething issues. Guests to the exhibition in Paris got “visas”, not typical tickets. They needed to reply questions on themselves to be able to be allowed in. Once they seemed for steering from workers about what was exhibiting the place, Khrzhanovsky explains, “the reply they acquired is that they [the staff] didn’t know – as a result of the character of totalitarianism and the character of life is that you simply don’t know”. This will have made for heightened Soviet-style realism but it surely didn’t all the time contribute to buyer satisfaction.In 2019, the non-public financing ran out. “Then it was my duty,” Khrzhanovsky says. He admits there have been instances he wished to desert the Dau venture altogether and “to do one thing else”. In 2020, he was appointed inventive director of the Babyn Yar memorial centre in Kyiv, commemorating the 34,000 Jews murdered in a ravine in Kyiv by the Nazis in September 1941. He additionally labored as an affiliate producer on Sergei Loznitsa’s 2021 movie in regards to the bloodbath, Babyn Yar. Context, and its 2022 follow-up The Kiev Trial.A commemoration … The Kiev Trial. {Photograph}: Atoms VoidThen got here the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the summertime of 2023, the director stepped down from the Babyn Yar venture; he’s now residing in Berlin and is choosing up the items of Dau. He has 700 hours of movie, 4,000 hours of sound, sufficient materials to fill 247 books, every 500 pages lengthy, and an estimated 1,500 terabytes of knowledge. He has employed a large cupboard space to accommodate the “40,000 items of costume, artwork installations, props and components that we ready for the discharge”.A lot of this was beforehand stored in an enormous mansion in Piccadilly owned by property magnates the Reuben brothers. “The Reubens gave us the constructing virtually without cost. I supplied our firm to be live-in guards. It was a time once they have been ready for planning permission.”Khrzhanovsky is again modifying materials he shot virtually twenty years in the past – and he believes that Dau has a brand new relevance and urgency. “When Dau was introduced six or seven years in the past, there have been many questions as to why I used to be touching this unusual story in regards to the Stalin period. At the moment, it was not such an enormous matter. These days, I believe it has one other that means. I hope that, via this venture, it’s doable to know one thing extra in regards to the nature of totalitarianism. We’ve got to know the place we’re, and what sort of big hazard the world is going through now, and that this evil has completely different faces.”The plan is to launch the “mom movie” subsequent yr. Within the meantime, the never-before-seen Dau physics movies on present in Venice depict actual modern scientists – together with the Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde and Nobel prize winner David Gross – debating quantum idea throughout the historic situations of Lev Landau’s Soviet laboratory. This, not less than, is one small a part of Khrzhanovsky’s gargantuan and vastly contentious venture that shouldn’t depart any controversy trailing in its wake. The Dau physics movies display as a part of The Quantum Impact, an exhibition curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies, which is at San Marco Artwork Centre, Venice, till 23 November