IN THE CENTER OF THE REGION

Movie booth

Perhaps more people came to the opening of the smallest possible film festival - "Cinema of the 90s" than they knew about it. There are seven films in total. From the Novaya Gazeta project “The Cinema That We Lost”, the most hidden, or the most shocking, ...

Perhaps more people came to the opening of the smallest possible film festival - "Cinema of the 90s" than they knew about it. There are seven films in total. From the Novaya Gazeta project, The Cinema We Lost, they chose the most hidden, or the most shocking, or the most turning points, and scored evening screenings for a week in the club, the former Wick cinema.

The hall in the club is small, a hundred people. Here they are gathered. All one hundred. Strange, mostly young people who for some reason are interested in the lost cinema of the 90s when they attended preschool institutions. The audience of the Museum of Cinema, the dramatic fate of which could not be forgotten.

Any artistic product, taken into the light of God from the storeroom, has the property to radiate the substance of time. It is not easy to reflect it, like a picture hanging in a museum, or an old book, or a spinning wheel from an open display. What no one sees for a long time accumulates a special energy of mystery. And the film in this sense is no different from the unknown autograph of Pushkin. For the point is not in absolute artistic value, but in a special relationship with history, encoded in a forgotten, and therefore, as it were, dead document. But manuscripts don't burn, and film doesn't smolder. The film, which has returned from non-existence, carries more information than the popular "live" cinema.

Lutsik and Samoryadov's "Outskirts" was chosen to open the festival. This is a very meaningful choice. Petr Lutsik and Aleksey Samoryadov are the most talented and most enigmatic figures of the generation. Their death, one after the other, is not just two untimely deaths of two bright artists. This, do not take it for cynicism, is an artistic action in the highest sense of the word. The departure of not one, but two authors at once, who made up the biological and spiritual system.

The death of Lutsik and Samoryadov told us about the essence of their work, perhaps more than their lives. For all their short lives, both dealt not with the regime and not even with a person in society, but with death. And "Outskirts" - for all its strictly cinematic significance - is an infernal film that provokes attention to alien entities. They played with death, and it is impossible to say with certainty that they lost. As well as their heroes, whose life, having begun in everyday reality, goes back to the symbol and continues in the context of high conventionality and dazzling absurdity.

This quality unites the best of the "lost" films of the 90s - the demonic and poisonous time from which today's reality sprouted. Many authors could not stand it, their flesh and psyche gave up - Lutsik and Samoryadov, Nikita Tyagunov and Nadezhda Kozhushanaya, Viktor Tsoi and Sergey Bodrov ... The martyrology can be continued. And you can not continue. Because the departed continue to speak in their films and, paradoxically, they speak with them more clearly, accurately and exhaustively.

In the remaining four days of the festival, we will see: "Drumming" by Sergei Ovcharov, "Orange Jazz" by Alexander Isupov, "Needle" by Rashid Nugmanov, "Asthenic Syndrome" by Kira Muratova.