And they shouldn’t drink water on the Volga...

The remake of the legendary film by Grigory Alexandrov turned into a masterpiece of conceptual art

The other day, young and famous directors and video artists Andrei Silvestrov and Pavel Labazov presented their new version of the film “Volga-Volga”. They re-edited the epoch-making Soviet comedy, following the directions of Viktor Shklovsky, who wrote in 1938 that the action of the comedy was drawn out and the middle was slipping. Using editing scissors, the young directors sped up the action, reducing the film's running time to seventy minutes. But this is sheer nonsense compared to the invasion that Silvestrov and Labazov allowed themselves in relation to the very screen space of the film “Volga-Volga”. Firstly, the film was new to the ears. Composer Eduard Sivkov gave him a new luxurious sound. Attracted a balalaika orchestra, harmonicas, accordion, boys' choir and bass guitars. As a result, all of Dunaevsky’s textbook music sounded with a glorious postmodernist drive. Transforming the film's sound image was not easy for Sivkov. According to Pavel Labazov, “Dunaevsky’s music turned out to be so difficult that as a result of rewriting it, Eduard broke his arm.” However, the voices of the main participants remained the same. That is, Byvalov speaks in the voice of Igor Ilyinsky. However, there is a major exception. The postwoman Dunya, played in that film by Lyubov Orlova, is replaced by the famous performance artist Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe. The figure of Lyubov Orlova remained, but she had a new face - pasted into the film, made up like Mamyshev’s Orlova. The voice also became Mamyshevsky. And the new Dunya did something terrible to the old painting.

In the figurative expression of one good critic, Dunya-Monroe-Orlova “famously infiltrated the film’s plot, its black-and-white proletarian values, its pseudo-classical cardboard style; meanings and contexts revolve around the girl’s (Monroe) head, like a picture on a nail, old logic breaks down, organizing a new clownish perspective with a projection onto Putin’s Russia.” About the allusions to Putin's Russia - this, it seems to me, is for the effective ending of the phrase, but the fact that Monroe's head, sewn to Orlova, became a saboteur in the enemy camp and ultimately turned the fine structure of a venerable film into infernal ruins - everything is for sure . Andrei Silvestrov, Pavel Labazov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe created an opus that is impeccable in its purity of concept and execution - fundamental in understanding the meaning and meaning of the mask image that the artist Monroe chose in his creative life. We all remember that this artist loves to dress up: now as Charlie Chaplin, now as Stalin, now as Alla Pugacheva, now as Marilyn Monroe, now as Lyubov Orlova, God knows who else. This changing of clothes does not threaten the artist with losing his own face. On the contrary, it is in him that he becomes a full-fledged Author - a commentator on the cultural myth that has layered itself like a cocoon around the odious figure. Monroe breaks this cocoon with irony.

In the new version of "Volga-Volga" his face is an infernal grotesque mask in medieval expression, poorly glued to the body. Sharp body movements allow her to jump back for a second and guess another face behind her and also the mask that Lyubov Orlova had already put on in order to portray the postwoman Dunya. Monroe's voice is recorded at high speed and therefore resembles Pinocchio, voiced long ago by the great Litvinov. And the plasticity itself, and the facial expressions, and the life of the new Dunya inside the film are stylized as the behavior of a Hoffmannian puppet, an infernal dwarf or a pulcinella, with its presence refuting the well-known aphorism of “the three from Prostokvashin”, that they go crazy one by one - only they all get the flu together. One of the roles of a transvestite in culture is to present to the world the virus of collective madness, striking in the form of a mania to have a presumption of the norm as such. The antics and jumps of Monrov's nasal Dunya-Orlova, as Vadim Rudnev accurately remarked, turns the exemplary steamship of amateur performances sailing to Moscow from Melkovodsk into a Boschian “ship of fools.” And all Alexandrov’s scenery with the “correct” people and plot schemes painted on them crumbles right before our eyes. And it is the mask that has the right to vote and comment. The wise Mikhail Yampolsky, in his book about Leviathan (about the presentation of power), called this self-discovery of the philosopher under a carnival mask “sliding” from the central, ceremonial, neoclassical perspective (it is very popular in totalitarian regimes) sideways, into the unrepresentative, “under-mask” world, from which It is better to observe and comment. Silvestrov, Labazov, Monroe slipped successfully.

Sergei KHACHATUROV