Cine Fantom

Igor

and G

leb A

lein

ikov

Tra

ctor

s 19

87 ©

Igo

r an

d G

leb A

lein

ikov

TAT E F I LM

CINE FANTOM Club programmes have been

shown at the Cottbus Film Festival (1995),

the European Media Art Fest (Osnabruck,

1998), Anthology Film Archives in New York

as part of the extensive program Recent

Russian Experimental Films (1999), Moscow

International Film Festival (2005–10), Rotterdam

International Film Festival (2006), ATA (Artists’

Television Access) Cinema and Video Festival

(San-Francisco) (2007); 2008 Images Festival,

Toronto; Russian Film Festival London (2007);

Berlinale International Film Festival (2009); Tate

Modern (2009); and Lincoln Center in New York.

TRACTORS Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, USSR 1987, 16mm, 12 min

A tractor is one of the most prominent

symbols of a happy Soviet life, of peaceful

labour and a rich harvest. Mythologised

to the highest degree, the tractor acquires

traits of a supernatural animal or of a

human being and ceases to be merely a

machine. The fi lm’s voiceover, which grows

in intensity from objective description

to individual obsession, highlights the

emerging individualisation of the gaze as

opposed to collective ideology. Using found

propaganda material, Tractors suggests the

tragic history behind this Soviet icon.

Igor

and G

leb A

lein

ikov

Tra

ctor

s 19

87 ©

Igo

r an

d G

leb A

lein

ikov

TRACTOR DRIVERS 2 Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, Russia 1992, 35mm, 84 minCast: Yevgeny Kondratiev, Maria-Larissa Waterloo-Borodina, Alexander Beliavsky, Boris Yukhananov, Anatoly Kuznetsov, Peter Pospelov, Yevgeny Yufit, Alexander Doulerain, Oleg Khaibullin

The fi rst Russian remake of Ivan Pyr’ev’s

1939 comedy Traktoristy. A protagonist

is a demobbed tractor driver who fi nds

himself drawn into a confl ict between a

kolkhoz (collective farm) of millionaires and

a neighbouring kolkhoz run by marauding

terrorists, and into a romance with a femme

fatale tractor brigadier.

Cine Fantom

Igor

and G

leb A

lein

ikov

Tra

ctor

Dri

vers

2

1992

© Igo

r an

d G

leb A

lein

ikov

Cine Fantom16–25 September 2011Tate ModernStarr AuditoriumAll screenings £5 (£4)

The legendary Moscow fi lm club CINE FANTOM

came into existence in 1986, when it was fi rst

conceived as a ‘samizdat’ fi lm journal, edited

by artist fi lmmakers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov.

Closely linked with the underground Soviet

Parallel Cinema movement, CINE FANTOM

continues to be a vibrant and respected forum

for independent thinkers, fi lmmakers, artists

and writers. This series of seven screenings

marks the 25th anniversary of this remarkable

experiment in Russian cinema.

Aleinikov Brothers

Friday 16 September, 19.00Aleinikov Brothers

The brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov represent

the fi rst generation of independent fi lmmakers

in the Soviet Union, who no longer fi lmed

and produced fi lms within the studio system.

In the 1980s they belonged to the school of

Moscow conceptualism and took active part

in underground art activities. They worked in

such genres as mail art, book art, Sots art and

home art.

The Aleinikov brothers made it into history

in 1987 when they became the founders of

Parallel Cinema, an independent fi lmmaking

movement that served as an alternative to

the offi cial fi lm industry in the USSR. Their

aesthetics and ideology were absolutely

incompatible with the rules commonly accepted

in Soviet cinema. Collaborating as a duo,

Igor and Gleb Aleinikov made experimental

underground movies shot on narrow gauge

fi lm, such as Tractors (1987), I’m frigid, but it

doesn’t matter (1987), The Severe Illness of Men

(1987), Post-Political Cinema (1988) and many

others. The brothers founded CINE FANTOM

magazine, dedicated to the theory, poetics and

practice of shooting motion pictures, and they

organised festivals and screenings of Parallel

Cinema. In 1990 they won the International Jury

Prize of the International Short Film Festival in

Oberhausen, Germany, for their fi lm Waiting for

de Bill. The Aleinikov brothers started working

in offi cial cinema in the late 1980s by shooting

a medium-length fi lm, Someone Was Here (1989)

and a full-length fi lm, Tractor Drivers 2 (1992).

In March 1994 Igor Aleinikov died in a

plane crash. One year later Gleb Aleinikov

founded the CINE FANTOM Club. Retrospective

screenings of the Aleinikov brothers’ fi lms and

TATE FILM

Bori

s Yu

khan

anov

Mad

Pri

nce

Esth

er

1987

– 2

006

© B

ori

s Yu

khan

anov

YES, THE DOWN SYNDROME SUFFERERS OR THE QUEST FOR GOLDEN BIRDSBoris Yukhananov, Russia 1997, video, 110 min

This fi lm is a part of Yukhnanov’s project,

‘Down Syndrome Sufferers Comment on

the World’. With a microphone, gazing at

the camera as if it were a real creature

in need of warmth and compassion,

the Down Syndrome Sufferers – Sasha,

Misha and Lyosha – contemplate the

phenomenon of television as they see it.

The Down Syndrome Sufferers play a game

of TV: they make and give interviews and

prepare reports that develop into talk

show confessionals. The Down Syndrome

Sufferers get angry with one another, make

peace, fall in love, lose their friendship –

all of which lasts a century, a century not

longer than a minute, a minute longer than

a lifetime.

Bori

s Yu

khan

anov

Yes

, The

Dow

n Sy

ndro

me

Suff

erer

s or

The

Que

st F

or

Gol

den

Bir

ds 1

997

© B

oris

Yuk

hana

nov

Short Films

Sunday 18 September, 15.00

REVERIES Yevgeny Kondratiev, Russia 1988, 16 mm, 10 min

New Wild Cinema. A horse fell in the middle

of a road and squinted its half-dead eye – it

happened not in a poem by Baudelaire but

on roll of fi lm named ‘Svema’. In the same

fi lm the sheep were clipped by shepherds.

Children and old men peeped into lens of

a camera, their smiles and wrinkles were

as real as the steppes, as salted puddles

of lakes. For a split of a second a suspicion

was rising: what if all these really exist

somewhere? Existing all by itself, behind

the frames of an artistic dream, behind the

frames of reveries.

Cine Fantom

Yevg

eny

Kond

rati

ev R

ever

ies

1988

© Y

evge

ny

Kond

rati

ev

Olga Stolpovskaya & Dmitry Troitsky

Saturday 17 September, 15.00

Olga Stolpovskaya is a Moscow-based artist and

fi lm director. She graduated from the Moscow

Art State School in 1986 and in 1997 from

the Moscow Studio for Individual Directing.

As a fi lmmaker Olga collaborates with Dmitry

Troitsky, who graduated from the Moscow

Studio for Individual Directing, organised by

Boris Yukhananov. Troitsky works as an actor,

fi lm and video director, producer. Stolpovskaya

and Troitsky’s video Bruner’$ Trial premiered

at TV Gallery, Moscow in 1998, and was later

purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New

York. You I Love became their fi rst full-length fi lm.

In 2010 Olga Stolpovskaya wrote, directed and

co-produced her second full-length feature fi lm,

Casual Liaison.

YOU I LOVE Olga Stolpovskaya & Dmitry Troitsky, Russia 2004, 35mm, 83 min Cast: Ljubov Tolkalina, Evgeniy Koryakovskiy, Dmitriy Badmaev Camera: Alexander Simonov

Set in Moscow, this stylish comedy of

manners features Timofei, an ad executive

in a top Russian advertising fi rm, and

Vera, a glamorous news anchorwoman,

who seem tailor-made to be the kind of

‘perfect couple’ one might see in a lifestyle

magazine. Everything is upended when

Timofei’s car collides with young Uloomji, a

young day worker who spends most of his

time sweeping cages in the Moscow zoo.

Ulmooji’s attraction to Timofei leads to a

series of misadventures that uncover new

sexual attitudes against a backdrop of rising

capitalist excess.

Boris Yukhananov

19.00, Saturday 17 September

Boris Yukhananov is a theatre director, poet

and writer, theorist, fi lm and video director,

founder of the ‘slow video’ movement, and a co-

founder of Parallel Cinema. In 1986 Yukhananov

established the fi rst independent theatre group,

Theater Theater, and in 1988 he created the

Individual Directorship Studio. Yukhananov

is a director of such theatre performances as

Faust, Octavia, Garden, The Story of the Erect

Man, and LaboraTORIA.Golem, amongst others.

In Garden, Yukhananov uses both professional

and non-professional actors, and also people

with Down syndrome. In the School of Dramatic

Art (founded by Anatoly Vassiliev) Yukhananov

became the director of the Golem LaboraTORY

project, an experimental approach to studying

the Torah through theatre. Yukhananov is one

of the fi rst artists to shoot video in the USSR.

Keenly aware of the differences between cinema

and video, he produced classics of Parallel

Cinema, including Game of XO (1987) and The

Mad Prince Fassbinder (1988). Yukhananov’s

most recent project is the documentary cinema

mystery play, Nazidanie. Yukhananov is Honorary

President of the CINE FANTOM club.

TATE FILM

Olg

a St

olp

ovsk

aya

and D

mit

ry T

roit

sky

You

I Lov

e 20

04

© O

lga

Stolp

ovsk

aya

and D

mit

ry T

roit

sky

EMMA TSUNTS Oleg Khaibullin,Russia, 1997, 35 mm, 12 min Camera: Alexander Vdovin; Production Design: Daniel Lebedev, Valery Patkonen; Music: Andrey Murashov; Cast: Olga Stolpovskaya, Dmitry Troitsky, Marina Maximik, Andrey Silvestrov, Jury Yurinsky

This fi lm references Jorge Luis Borges’s

short story, Emma Zunz, the tale of a

bashful and timid factory girl. Sacrifi cing

her chastity, she commits a meticulously

elaborated murder of revenge.

Ole

g Khai

bulli

n Em

ma

Tsun

ts 1

997

©

Ole

g Khai

bulli

n

SELF-PORTRAIT Ilya Permyakov,Russia 2006, video, 17 min

In this video work the self-portrait of a face,

which hides behind the frame, becomes a

fraction, a metonymic part that substitutes

the whole, a composite of a model and

four young artists who listen to, depict and

mimetically reproduce each other.

Ilya

Perm

yako

v Se

lf-p

ortr

ait

2006

© Ily

a Pe

rmya

kov

HAPPINESS: THE MOVIE Grigoriy Dikkert & Lenka Kabankova,Russia 2002, 16mm transferred to video, 19 min

Leading the viewer through a labyrinth of

sensational discoveries about the secrets of

psycho-programming and human behaviour

management, the authors reveal the single

aim of this journey: to be happy.

Gri

gori

y D

ikke

rt a

nd L

enka

Kab

anko

va

Hap

pin

ess:

The

Mov

ie 2

002

© G

rigo

riy

Dik

kert

and L

enka

Kab

anko

va

Yevgeny Yufit

Friday 23 September, 19.00

Yevgeny Yufi t (born 1961 in Leningrad) is a

member of Russia’s Parallel Cinema movement.

He fi rst became famous for his macabre short

fi lms, which often look as though they were

made during the 1920s or 30s. In the 1990s,

Yufi t began making features similar in style to

his shorts, with plots often centred on genetic

experimentation and pseudoscience. He is often

described as a ‘necrorealist’; he uses elements of

horror and science fi ction cinema and combines

them with the bleakest aspects of neo-realism

to examine humanity’s relationship with death

and decay. Yufi t examines the metamorphoses

of corpses as a metaphor for cinema: expired

celluloid and careless editing are seen as

cadavers, suicides or zombies. He courts

complete madness, fi lming endless ideological

battles at high speed, struggles in which ‘us’ and

‘them’ are indistinguishable.

Cine Fantom

BRUNER’$ TRIAL Olga Stolpovskaya & Dmitry Troitsky,Russia 1998, video, 22 min Camera: Alexander Dolgin; Music: Iraida Yusupova Production Design: Daniel Lebedev; Produced by: Olga Stolpovskaya; Cast: Andrey Gluck

The script of Bruner’$ Trial is based on a

real-life scandal that received international

coverage. Russian artist Alexander

Brener was sentenced to prison for six

months in 1997 for vandalising Kazimir

Malevich’s 1927 masterpiece White Cross in

Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum by painting

a green dollar sign on the canvas. The case

prompted heated debate about whether to

classify Brener’s exploits as an art action or

an act of vandalism. Extracts from Brenner’s

trial transcript are used in the fi lm.

Olg

a St

olp

ovsk

aya

and D

mit

ry T

roit

sky

Brun

er’$

Tri

al 1

998

© O

lga

Stol

pov

skay

a an

d D

mit

ry T

roit

sky

THE CRUEL ILLNESS OF MEN Aleinikov Brothers USSR 1987, 16 mm, 10 min

Accompanied by a score of abbreviated

drones and freeform woodwinds, the

Aleinikov brothers compose a cinematic

collage of images, found and made, that

look unfailingly bleak and industrial:

disused factories, clunky utilitarian

machinery, old-fashioned group portraits

with the sitters’ eyes scratched out. Brief

moments of action are interspersed that

indicate celluloid’s fragile debt to the

vagaries of time and the physical world. The

fi lm closes with a brutal metaphor, a scene

of homosexual rape in an underground

railway carriage.

Igor

and

Gle

b A

lein

ikov

The

Cru

el Il

lnes

s O

f Men

198

7 ©

Igor

and

Gle

b A

lein

ikov

FOUR ITEMS Alexander Doulerain and Yan Rauch, Russia 1995, 16 mm, 10 min Cast: Boris Bajenov, Maxim Gladkikh, Alexander Doulerain, Inna Kolossova, Sergey Koryagin, Yan Rauch

Four ways to achieve eternal bliss with the

help of four items: a staircase, an axe, a

bomb and a pistol.

Ale

xand

er D

ouer

ain

and Y

an R

auch

Fo

ur It

ems

1995

© A

lexa

nd

er D

ouer

ain

and Y

an R

auch

TATE FILM

Cine Fantom Video

Saturday 24 September, 15.00

BACTERIA BULGARICUS TAKE OUTERSPACE Yuri Leiderman & Andrey Silvestrov,Russia, 2003, video, 24 min

Kefi r grains are colonies of special

bacteria that look like whitish lumps with

a variety of bizarre fractal forms. The

artist Yuri Leiderman grew kefi r grains

in Moscow to ‘train’ them and selected

the healthiest samples. Selected grains

in small glass ‘astronaut suits’ were

included in a parabolic fl ight during which

they were exposed to variable gravities.

Their behaviour (soaring, destruction,

accumulation, etc) was documented for this

fi lm. The resulting story alludes to principles

of the Russian Cosmism movement, such as

‘cosmic selection’. These small, indifferent

white lumps become a metaphor for

Cosmism’s grandeur and subsequent

decline.

Yuri

Lei

der

man

and A

ndre

y Si

lves

trov

Ba

cter

ia B

ulga

ricu

s Ta

ke O

uter

spac

e 20

03

© Y

uri L

eider

man

and A

ndre

y Si

lves

trov

MUTEThe Blue Soup Group,Russia 1999, 1 min 50

Fade out, by means of windshield wipers,

and fade back into white.

The

Blue

Soup G

roup

Mut

e 19

99

© T

he

Blue

Soup G

roup

FIVE STARS The Blue Soup Group, Russia 2000, 1 min 40

Peculiarities of standardised evaluation.

The

Blue

Soup G

roup F

ive

Star

s 20

00

© T

he

Blue

Soup G

roup

Cine Fantom

In 1993, Yevgeny Yufi t received the Grand Prix

at the Rimini Film Festival for his full-length

feature fi lm, Daddy, Father Frost is Dead. As a

photographer and painter Yufi t participated

in major exhibitions of Soviet and Russian art

during the 1980s and 90s. Retrospectives of his

fi lms were shown at the Museum of Modern Art,

New York, Anthology Film Archives, New York,

and Saint Petersburg University.

WEREWOLF ORDERLIES Yevgeny Yufit, USSR 1984, 16 mm, 5 min

A young sailor gets off a train and makes

his way towards the forest with a saw

in his hands. He sees strange people in

white overalls behaving in an eccentric and

absurd way. The young man resigns himself

to the general insanity, and werewolf

orderlies tear him into pieces. The fi nal

image emerging before his eyes is a white

ship on the horizon – the Soviet symbol of

joy and happiness. Yufi t admits that he had

no professional notion of cinematography

at the time of shooting the picture. It was

made on impulse on the train, and a group

of punks from the ‘Automatic Satisfactors’

union became the main characters of the

fi lm.

Yevg

eny

Yufi t

Wer

ewol

f Ord

erlie

s 19

84

© Y

evge

ny

Yufi t

DADDY, FATHER FROST IS DEAD Russia, 1992, 35 mm, 73 min Script: Vladimir Maslov, based on the short story Vampire’s Family by Alexey Tolstoy) Sound: Mikhail Podtukai; Cast: Vladimir Maslov, Ivan Ganja, Ludmila Kozlovskaya, Anatoly Egorov, Valeriy Krishtapenko, Boris Ilyasov

Father Frost brings in the New Year and

starts the new cycle of life, but can he die?

And if the answer is ‘yes’, does it mean that

time will also stop? A young biologist from

the city looks for a secluded place where he

can continue his research about the illness

of a red-toothed shrew. He fi nds a village

inhabited by strange people; everyone

seems to be possessed by maniacal ideas.

The scientist becomes uncertain whether he

will become a victim or an executioner.

Yevg

eny

Yufi t

Dad

dy,

Fat

her

Fros

t Is

Dea

d 19

92 ©

Yev

geny

Yufi t

TATE FILM

encouraging them to grow up at an

alarmingly young age.

AES

+F

King

Of T

he F

ores

t (p

art

1)

2001

© A

ES+F

ROCK MUSIC Viktor Alimpiev, Russia 2003, 7 min 30

A group of schoolboys listening to their

teacher playing the guitar serves as an

analysis of the mythology surrounding

juvenile ideas about masculine training.

Young people are shown in detail; the

camera focuses on minimalist and ritual

gestures of the group to describe youthful

awkwardness. Ironically the soundtrack (Bill

Frisell’s Strange Meeting) is not in fact rock

music, but jazz.

Vik

tor

Alim

pie

v Ro

ck M

usic

20

03 ©

Vik

tor

Alim

pie

v

FASTENING EYES Ilya Permyakov, Russia 2007, video, 4 min 17

This video integrates improvised rituals

performed on the borderline between sand

and water, images of ecstatic gestures

and petrifi ed monuments, and vers

libre subtitles. All images have precisely

calculated duration; when emerging,

every new image palpates the previous

frame, intertwines and conjugates with it,

reduces it to zero, but having not enough

time to get rid of interaction dependency,

immediately gets tangled up into a new

knot of images and is gradually merged

by it.

Ilya

Perm

yako

v Fa

sten

ing

Eyes

20

07 ©

Ily

a Pe

rmya

kov

Ivan The Idiot & Offshore Reserves

19.00, Saturday 24 September

JAMIE BRADSHAWJamie Bradshaw is both a fi lm writer/director/

producer and a fi lm marketer. He is the

only American member of the Cine Fantom

movement. Currently, he just wrapped his

feature directorial debut entitled Branded

(together with Alexander Doulerain), which

will be released nationwide theatrically Spring

of 2012. Branded is a sci-fi /thriller starring Ed

Stoppard, Leelee Sobieski, Jeffrey Tambor, and

Max Von Sydow about a monster conspiracy

Cine Fantom

PANORAMA The Blue Soup Group, Russia 2002, 1 min 45

Even a 360-degree panorama can leave a

crucial event outside the frame.

The

Blue

Soup G

roup P

anor

ama

2002

©

The

Blue

Soup G

roup

VESTIBULE (PART 1)The Blue Soup Group, Russia 2003, 1 min 20VESTIBULE (PART 2)The Blue Soup Group, Russia 2005, 1 min 15Sound: James Welburn & Carlo Krug

An empty and vast vestibule hosts

uncanny events.

The

Blue

Soup G

roup V

esti

bul

e (p

art

1)

2003

© T

he

Blue

Soup G

roup

GAS The Blue Soup Group, Russia 2003, 1 min 15

The space behind a thick shroud of

gas seems to be empty and real, but

appearances are deceptive.

The

Blue

Soup G

roup G

as 2

003

©

The

Blue

Soup G

roup

KING OF THE FOREST AES+F, Russia 2001–03, video in three parts: 9.03 min, 10.14 min, 10.20 min

The King of the Forest, who kidnaps the

souls of beautiful children and keeps them

in his palace, is a mythological villain of

medieval European folklore used by writers

from Goethe to Michele Tournier. This

modern day version by the collective AES+F

(Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny

Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes) concerns the

role played by history, religion, mass media,

and industry in seducing our youth. The

work explores contemporary civilisation’s

multiethnic cultures and how each society

raises their children in accordance with

agendas denoted by previous generations.

The artists question how positive change

can be implemented in the world by

questioning the values and foibles we instil

in the next generation. With this series,

AES+F has created a puzzling, mysterious

portrait of society. As our world continues

to become increasingly interconnected, our

children are bombarded with images from

television, print media, and the internet,

TATE FILM

Ale

xand

er D

ouer

ain

and

Serg

ey K

orya

gin

Ivan

The

Idio

t 20

02 ©

Ale

xand

er D

ouer

ain

and

Serg

ey K

orya

gin

OFFSHORE RESERVESJamie Bradshaw & Alexander Doulerain,Russia/US 2004, 35 mm, 15 min Cast: Dmitry Troitsky, Gleb Aleinikov, John Harrison, Oleg Haybullin, Olga Stolpovskaya

Hannah Marker is gravely ill. She is addicted

to money. Her psychoanalyst advises her to

leave the United States, because her illness

manifests only in the presence of US dollars.

Hannah arrives in Russia and becomes head

of a fund that imports hen’s legs. One day

she tests the legs and fi nds out that they

are contaminated. She is offered a bribe –

one million dollars in cash. She is not able

to decline the bribe, but at the same time

cannot go on living with the thought of

accepting kickbacks. Hannah experiences a

psychological transformation. She becomes a

new person, but not necessarily a human one.

Jam

ie B

radsh

aw a

nd A

lexa

nder

Dou

lera

in

Off

shor

e Re

serv

es 2

004

© J

amie

Bra

dsh

aw

and

Ale

xand

er D

oule

rain

Andrey Silvestrov

Sunday 25 September, 15.00

Director of numerous award-winning short

fi lms and video projects, full-length fi lms

and documentaries, Andrey Silvestrov is a

co-founder and the program director of the

CINE FANTOM club.

BRAINAndrey Silvestrov, Russia 2009, 70 minDirector of Photography: Andrey Kostiakov; Music: Iraida YusupovaProduced by: Gleb Aleinikov and Andrey Silvestrov; Computer graphics: Aleksei Pan’kin, Alexander Lobanov, Aleksei Skliznev

In contemporary Moscow, random passers-

by stop in front of the camera and talk

about themselves or about the issues

that bother them. Each person introduces

himself or herself in a different manner.

Some people try to appeal to our sense

of compassion, while others wish to boast

about their success. Some people present

themselves as if they were ‘goods for

sale’, advertising their physical assets, like

weight and height. All together they shape

a uniform human mass with a certain

collective consciousness. The documentary

scenes are interchanged with scenes

involving professional actors in order to

emphasise the fi lm’s absurdity.

And

rey

Silv

estr

ov B

rain

20

09

© A

nd

rey

Silv

estr

ov

Cine Fantom

in the near future to control our desires led

by monsters with a disturbing connection to

corporations and brands. Currently he is also

Senior VP of Creative Advertising for 20th

Century Fox. He co-founded and served as

Creative Director/EVP of Ignition Creative, the

leading motion picture advertising Agency in

Hollywood. He has received numerous movie

marketing awards and nomination including

Hollywood Reporter’s Key Art Award. He and his

Russian wife and son reside in their home in the

Pacifi c Palisades.

ALEXANDER DOULERAINDirector, producer, scriptwriter. One of the

founders of CINE FANTOM CLUB. General

Producer of TNT - one of the leading Russian

Broadcasting Network. Has produced and

directed numerous short fi lms, that were shown

on many fi lm festivals all over the world. In

2002 his fi rst feature fi lm (together with Sergey

Koryagin) Ivan The Idiot was theatrically released

in Russia. The fi lm was shown at Moscow

International Film Festival, Rotterdam Film

Festival, Cairo Film Festival. In 2006 directed

(together with Sergey Koryagin) TV series

BUNKER OR SCIENTISTS UNDER EARTH. Recently,

as a producer, made NASHA RUSSIA, UNIVER,

INTERNY, REALNYE PATSANY - the most popular

sitcoms on Russian Television. A producer of

Russian movies BEST MOVIE EVER (grossed $27.5

millions) and NASHA RUSSIA: YAYTSA SUDBY

(grossed over $22 million). He just fi nished his

fi rst English language feature fi lm BRANDED

(together with Jamie Bradshaw), Branded is a sci-

fi /thriller starring Ed Stoppard, Leelee Sobieski,

Jeffrey Tambor, and Max Von Sydow. Lives in

Moscow. Has a wife and two children.

SERGEY KORYAGINBorn 01.08.1966. Director and producer.

IVAN THE IDIOTAlexander Doulerain & Sergey Koryagin, Russia 2002, 35mm, 95 min Screenplay: Alexander Doulerain (with Inna Kolossova and Sergey Koryagin); Camera: Alexander Dolgin; Editing: Jamie Bradshaw; Production Design: Konstantin Vitavsky, Anastasia Nefedova; Costume Design: Anastasia Nefedova; Sound: Alexander Abramov Produced by: Alexander Doulerain, Sergey Koryagin; Cast: Inna Kolossova, Sergey Koryagin, Boris Yukhananov, Oleg Khaibullin, Gleb Aleinikov, Dmitry Troitsky, Nina Ruslanova, Sergey Chonishvili

Young Ivan (Sergey Koryagin) returns to his

native city of ‘Beyondwill’ and along the way

almost runs over a girl (Inna Kolossova) with

his car. In trying to help the girl, who suffers

from amnesia, he fi nds out that she has run

away from the clinic of mad medical genius

Dr Strauss (Boris Yukhananov). Not only is

the evil doctor secretly in love with the girl,

he has made her the subject of a medical

experiment gone wrong, hooking her brain

up to a computer which constantly plunges

her into a parallel reality. She seems to have

trouble adjusting to the world once out of

the clutches of the diabolical Dr Strauss. In

a desperate attempt to keep the woman he

loves, Dr Strauss pulls off one last dastardly

feat. He fi endishly uses his computer to

hide the girl deep in a sub-level reality

from which Ivan and his friends Ilya (Dmitry

Troitsky) and Arkady (Gleb Aleinikov) can

only hope to be able to free her. Initiating

the Russian Cybercomic genre, Ivan the Idiot

provides a window on to traditional Russian

fi lm and performance art through a new

generation of independent fi lmmakers,

actors, and artists.

TATE FILM

Cine Fantom

from anywhere else were mainly of a tactical

nature – while the NekroRealists in their aloof

less-being!-more-nothingness!-ways cum rather

more classically materialist approach to cinema

probably didn’t mind using the more klischee-

clusterfucking, hypersurrealism-prone dudes

from the capital whose sensibilities seemed

better synched to words and metaphors than

images and the false safety of surfaces...

Over the decades, Leningrad / Saint Petersburg

developed its very own underground idiom,

quite independently from the Moscovites –

just take the experimental animations of Boris

Kazakov, an epigone in the noblest and truest

sense of Yevgeny Kondratiev, Oleg Kotel’nikov

and many another tinker and thinker of things

scratch‘n painted onto celluloid, who – might

have – belonged to the legendary group avant-

garde outfit Severnyj poljus... CINE FANTOM’s

heydays were the early Perestroika years

when exploring new ideas and aesthetics was

something of a national pastime: Everybody incl.

granny and her goat, they fondly remember,

checked out these weird experiments in

subversion, just to know what it is, this strange

creature developing in their midst, this freedom

thing a lá Wäst.

The Aleinikovs as well as Yufit became

international cause célèbres, while at home

Sergej Solovev knighted Parallel Cinema in his

classic AssA (1987): the title itself is already

an homage (-by mimicry/appropriation) to

Yevgeny Kondratiev and Oleg Kotel’nikov who

in 1984 made a short named AssA in which

a dead chicken is ‘resurrected’ by running the

material backwards (which, again, goes back

to at least Vertov, etc.); more importantly,

there’s a sequence for which Solovev re-mixed

Kondratev’s Nanajnana (1986) with footage

from Kotelnikov sporting shakily shot scenes of

performances at Puškinskaja 10 (Leningrad /

Saint Petersburg’s legendary colutural center)

vis-à- vis weird hand-drawn and -painted

images suggesting dreams and nightmares. (In

2009, Solov’ev presented 2-ASSA-2, a sequel

to his cult classic that took a long, hard look

at what had become of this underground’s

dreams and hopes 20 years later – which is

little, and most of that is the stuff too much of

modern event culture is made of... Call it: a film-

implosion.)

In 1990, the 17th issue of CINE FANTOM

appeared – the last one. Other attempts at a

CINE FANTOM-magazine would follow. All things

CINE FANTOM petered towards the mid-90s,

with the plane crash-death of Igor Aleinikov in

1994 as a crassly slashed exclamation mark:

End!; only Yufit developed a career inside

his own system and aesthetic, even if his

latest work, Pryamohoždenie (2005), a(nother)

speculation about strange Stalinist experiments

in quadruple-cloning (cf. 4, d: Ilja Hržanovskij,

2004), shows signs of an irritating interest in

coming to terms with a wider arthouse audience.

Otherwise, other folks took over organising

the unorganisable: from 1993-5, eg. a festival

of underground cinema was held under the

umbrella Exotica. That said: As cinema was

always only one of several arts in which most of the

fantoms created, they didn’t really go astray, just

shifted focus – Yukhananov, e.g., became a kind

of counter-paragon of Russian theatre whose

experimental offerings, adaptations of classics

like Chekhov’s Vishnevyi Sad (The Cherry Garden)

as well as his own works like The Story of the

Erect Man, folks still talk about; his theater group

MIR, again, proved to be a breeding ground

for new underground hopefuls, like Alexander

Doulerain who’d develop into a key-figure of

Russian Parallel Cinema, or Andrey Silvestrov

who’d turn into one of the most interesting

video artists of the new millenium’s beginning,

or Olga Stolpovskaya and Dmitry Troitsky whose

co-directorial feature debut effort You I Love

The Once and Future Living Dead: A Fast Walk with Zombies and Other Revenants through CINE FANTOM Times Olaf Möller

Considering the Russian Orthodox obsession

with the spirituality of the material world, the

confrontational quality of godliness, it’s not too

surprising that death’n-decay’re at the core of all

things underground in the Soviet Union as well

as Russia. Or: In the netherworld of all things

post – from Communism to Modernism to the

office – the post-mortem is the sole sign, even

proof, of life; the underground, the beyond has

to be the zone of aliveness when daily life, as

such, is dead. Zombies walked, ghosts spectred,

cinema that made real(ist?) sense – avant-garde?,

retro-garde?: fuck! that! in this fecund constant

becoming – had to be a phantom.

Originally, CINE FANTOM was a somewhat

samizdat, homemade film magazine published

for the first time in Moscow supposedly in 1985

by the late Igor Aleinikov. He and his younger

brother Gleb were part of the Conceptualist Art

circles of the day, tinkering around with notions /

practices like mail art, etc. – and filmmaking, in a

way nobody in the Soviet empire ever had made

films, yet, too, in a way that didn’t feel alien in

its obsession with violence and morbidity, as

well as its absurdist sense of irony found when

looking at things from just the opposite mind-

angle. Just like, unbeknownst to them, several

other people at that time did, most importantly:

Yevgeny Kondratiev (nom de guerre: Debil),

Yevgeny Yufit and the (rest of the) NekroRealists

in then-Leningrad-now-Saint Petersburg, and

Boris Yukhananov in Moscow.

All these people learned about each other

mainly through their audience, common lore

has it: they showed their works in all kinds of

off-off- spaces/venues – (their own) apartments

more often than not – where, sometimes, they

were approached by viewers who told them

about some other mad mavericks in this town or

that, or just one ward away. Their backgrounds

as well as artistic foundations were varied: the

Aleinikovs, as mentioned, had a solid basis in the

world of arts, ditto Yufit (painting, photography...)

and Kondratiev, whereas Yukhananov, more a

video than a film guy, came from the theatre

(and psychiatrical work); as filmmakers, they’re

all autodidacts, although Yufit and the Aleinikovs

later were for some time adopted by major film

studios: Yufit and the other NekroRealists, whose

first essays were produced via an independent

studio called Mžalalafilm, found shelter in an

Aleksandr Sokurov-supervised experimental

wing of Lenfilm, while the Aleinikovs were

granted sanctuary in a somewhat similar arm

of Mosfilm – alliances both doomed to fail,

which they did, although they produced some

of strangest works both fractions came up

with: Yufit’s Rycari podnebesja (1989) and the

Aleinikovs’ Zdes kto-to byl (1989) and Tractor

drivers-2 (1992), the latter being one of the most

‘generally readable’ works from the Parallel

Cinema trenches.

It took until 1987 for CINE FANTOM to become

more than a notion: Starting for real with the first

festival of independent cinema called, surprise!,

CINE FANTOM, it developed into an ever more

officially recognized – if not necessarily but

then again totally sanctioned – magazine-cum-

screening-organiser which served as a forum

for all kinds of shadow film and video activities

in the Soviet Union – all that which is usually

referred to as Parallel Cinema, a term coined by

Igor – some say Aleinikov, others Pospelov (a

nowadays somewhat forgotten original fantom).

That said: For all its trans-USSR’ish attitude, as

well as its part-rootedness in the Leningrad/

Saint Petersburg underground, CINE FANTOM

was more a creature of Moscow than anything

else: the alliances of the Moscovites with folks

TATE FILM

Cine Fantom

1986, principal photography ended about ‘89,

the basic conceptualization of how to deal with it

all fixed in the mid-90s – and then, Yukhananov

stopped (and did other extraordinary videos),

hundreds of tapes were lying around and

starting to fade, some got lost, among them the

chapter Godard (yes, there is significance and

justice in decay).

It was only in 2005 that Yukhananov started to

finish his opus super- magnum – and what a

whatthefuck!soever it became: A memorandum

to an era whose protagonists are by now more

often than not dead - that the image is so

statograiny and already magnetopaled gives the

whole damn thing a ghost photography charm

-, as well an an exemplification of that era’s

theories/notions/ideals, in particular chapter

#5, Nipponese, an exercise in what Yukhananov

calls ‘fatal editing’. Two of the four chapters

Yukhananov was able to finish first are, quite

simply, extraordinary: #2, XO Game, and #3,

Esther. The latter is a lamento-variation on the

biblical story of Esther done as an allusion to the

Chechen catastrophe(-to-come back then) as well

as an essay over the ever-latent antisemitism in

Russia and beyond (the credits quote Luther’s

ranting against the canonical status of the

Book of Esther). As always, Yukhananov took

only a few choice elements - ranging from

a Falco’s Austro-pop-paean to a serial killer

to a discussion with a Cecen writer going

nationalistoballistic - and arranged them in such

a way that they open each other up: The whole

thing goes BOOOM with meaning and poetry.

XO Game, then, feels - looks, sounds, stinks really

- as if someone just vomited out his soul-guts:

It’s a thick, rawest slice of Fuck You!, an acting-

out of a sense of lostness in a country that’s just

not able to take whatever any more – Russia

as a prison cell and a bomb is ticking, with

people hemorrhaging words, walking blind in a

visionless world. The main thing here, as well as

in the other chapters so far, is the editing, live-

giving however fatal it might be. Yukhananov

has a fine sense of rhythm as well as the kind

of artistic ego that’s capable of creating-by-

chopping: Each cut is so decisive that everything

happening in the image always feels just and

there for a reason, no matter how amateurish

it all looks – it’s really more Punk than anything

else, SovPunk, therefore inyerface’r than

anything those Western sissies could ever gob

up. Besides all that, XO Game is a most haunting

experience: not only are the images sometimes

bordering on gone - cheap technology that

took a hard hit from time and its desolate frolic:

destruction - but quite a lot of people seen

are: gone. XO Game is the head stone of CINE

FANTOM.

These days, CINE FANTOM is more a brand than

an organization: a celebration of a fascinating

past whose values and ideas/ideals shan’t have

been in vain. Besides having more or less regular

shows with excessive after show- discussions

(especially whenever über-orator Yukhananov

shows up...), CINE FANTOM features all kinds of

media works ranging from videos by artists like

Yuri Leiderman or Olga Cernisheva to low-budget

feature films like Petr Hazizov’s forgettable

Manga (2005). The presence of Hazizov shows

quite well the kind of cultural/industrial ley lines

along which the revenant CINE FANTOM moves:

Hazizov owns one of Russia’s biggest CGI-

outfits and is, like Gleb Aleinikov or Doulerain,

something of a force in the new world of Russian

media.

Fittingly, CINE FANTOM is mellowing a bit

towards the middle ground and -brow, it seems:

Doulerain & Sergey Koryagin’s feature-length

grotesque Ivan the Idiot (2002) eg. feels, for all

its bite and often cruel jest, positively charming

and almost mild-mannered in its view of the

world, while the CINE FANTOM Screenings

during the XXIX Moscow International Film

TATE FILM

(2004) became an international break-through

film for a contemporary Russian indie-cinema

(early Sundance cool with a Moscovite lip...).

In 1995, CINE FANTOM was resurrected for the

first time under the aegis of above-mentioned

MIR’ean plus Gleb Aleinikov – as something

like the experimental film-arm of the Moscow

Cinema Museum. This went on till 2000. In the

early third millennium, 2002, to be exact, the

Fantom was back again – and stranger then

ever: First, CINE FANTOM tried to re-group in the

Moscow Cinema Museum, but after a famously

scandalous screening session head-lined ‘Better

Porn than Never,’ officialdom’s mighties turned

uncollaborative. So, CINE FANTOM became a

non-structure: It exists as an idea plus social

network that occasions events – an already

established organisational force cum klischee,

supported in this way or that by STS-TV where

several of its key players could carve out (at least

for some time) fat careers for themselves (above

all Gleb Aleinikov who stopped filmmaking

and serves now as the Fantom’s organisational

mastermind, Alexander Doulerain and Ol’ga

Stolpovskaja); fittingly, some of the most

fascinating and old school-CINE FANTOM’y

productions from the last years got made for

TV, cf. Doulerain’s full frontal trashy-nuts 20-part

series Bunker (2004) – Lloyd Kaufman of Troma

who’d been a guest of CINE FANTOM would

surely approve of this gem.

The development inside CINE FANTOM, the

whole Parallel Cinema-world, well, Russia in

general, come to think of it, is probably best

hinted at by looking at two quasi-remakes,

the Aleinikovs’ seminal Tractor Drivers-2 and

Pavel Labazov & Andrey Silvestrov & Vladislav

Mamyshev-Monroe’s irreverent masterpiece

Volga-Volga (2006): The first, a true Perestroika-

beast – and the Brother’s already second assault

on the sacred tractor – plays with, twirls, jerks

around motives from Ivan Pyrev’s classic of

Stalinist enterganda Traktoristij (1939), while the

latter invades Grigorij Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volga

(1938) by taking this darling of Sovtainment

as such and changing only a few things

around, like replacing the head of the film’s

star, Ljubov Orlova, with Mamyshev- Monroe’s

impersonation of her... The Aleinikov Brothers,

during the years their country changed around

and around, contemplated the notion - echt

Russian: the folly - of change as such: Tractor

Drivers-2 is a sequel-as-remake, a study in

aesthetic haunting, and how one can’t just

shed some old skin for a new one – the past is

a construction one needs to work with - ever

so gleefully iconoclastically - in order to get a

grip on it; or: Even taking the piss is work. The

film’s cast presents something of a stand-of

between the Old Guard and the avant-garde,

with several Soviet stars in the lead side by side

with icons of the underground – and it works, as

a confrontation, with no quarter considered by

any side.

Seventeen years later, it has become possible to

campolustily indulge in the kind of aesthetics the

Aleinikov Brothers needed to question: Labazov

& Silvestrov & Mamyshev-Monroe reclaim the

Soviet era for themselves, an impossible thing

to do without taking an ever so pranksterish

critical stance towards it, but also a necessity, for

it would be a waste of history/lives/possibilities

if one just wanted to forget about it; in a certain

way, their Volga-Volga does similar things as a

bunch of film historians and theoreticians have

been doing in the last about-decade when they

worked on reassessing the œuvres of masters

like, well, Pyrev and Aleksandrov.

The past is also one of the many subjects

of Boris Yukhananov’s hopeful monster Mad

Prince (1986/2006), an everything-at-once of

documentary, fiction, essay, and if one can

think of something else, just add it. The project,

a video-roman of 20 chapters, was started in

Festival consisted mainly of works one finds

in competitions of places like Locarno or

Rotterdam (the most outré work on offer

was easily Nina Šorina’s Nietzsche v Moskve,

a fantasy about the Tyrant of Torino’s visit

to nowaday’s Moscow). One should also

mention that CINE FANTOM isn’t cinema/

video avant- garde’s centre anymore, but

one of several players in the field – let’s

only mention the International Kansk Video

Festival (aka The Thinking Man’s Cannes aka

The Eastern Kanne) which established itself

as a prime force in underground cinema,

CINE FANTOM’s partner eg. at a Russian

Avant-garde Film festival in London, 2009;

fittingly, CINE FANTOM doesn’t seem to be

interested in supporting as vast a range

of experimental film or video modes of

expression, their makers, even if they’re

from around the corner – the works of

Moscovite Viktor Alimpiev and his epigones

like Marian Žunin and Sergej Višneskij eg.

seem to mean precious little to them, ditto

the mad movideo outbursts of Svetlana

Baskova whose Zelenyj slonik (1999) shall

for all eternity be considered a world

underground art axiom...

Let’s say: CINE FANTOM is the Russian avant-

garde’s arrière-garde – they keep the overall

project alive from the back and side-lines.

As a paragon of artistic disobedience, they

cast an almost impossibly long shadow

over Russia’s alternative arts and media –

essentially, they’re still the measuring rod.

– Olaf Möller is a film critic, writer and curator

based in Cologne

Visit www.tate.org.uk/modern/fi lm

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TGNearest Southwark / Bankside Pier

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