Physics of a fragile body

Short film about physics poetry

"Today, physicists are held in high esteem, now the lyrics are in the corral." This line of Boris Slutsky, outlining the boundaries of the gloomy topos of the now nonexistent empire and reminding the mood of a slightly naive, exalted chronos of the 1960s, half a century later gives rise to a reason for a nostalgic sigh and sad thought about why today it has a noticeably one of the physics, physic and technical faculties of universities They barely cope with the task of gaining a new course of students, and the corridors of specialized academic institutes, previously illuminated by playing eyes and filled with endless disputes about Schrödinger cats, the principle of complementarity, permanent bar, super -symmetry, stellar and synchophasotron, and are increasingly apparent dull and empty. Maybe I’m mistaken, but today to be a physicist in the countries of the former “one sixth part of the earth's land” is a kind of intellectual excess, an extravagant gesture of single enthusiasts or, say, a form of scientific asceticism. However, this is not about that.

We make a small mental experiment - a virtual trip to one of the university physical laboratories. Before us is a pile of ancient devices: ammeters, calorimeters, oscilloscope, steep weights, dichroscopes and many other enchanting incomprehensible objects that scientists have not used for a long time. They are as elegant as they are worthless. Sometimes laboratory assistants take them out of dusty cabinets with creaking doors and demonstrate smiling boys and girls who whisper to each other: “Cool!”, They manage to instantly make another selfie against the background of the mysterious mechanism using the iPhone Apple and immediately forget about everything what they saw. Anachronism? The island of optics and mechanics in the ocean of post-humanism, biopolitics and IT technologies? Why are all these pendulums and levers, outlandish cars and test tubes are carefully stored here for centuries, gradually turning into an abandoned kunstamer, or into a cemetery in the style of Steampunk, or in the museum of richer epochs of great physical discoveries?

The short film “Physics of the fragile body” based on the poem of the same name by Igor Pomerantsev is about this: about the magical scientific devices and mechanisms of past times, about memory and oblivion, about the strength of instruments and fragility of bodies, about the shame of the world of oscillating bases. Are the times of the good old positivism, when the physicists were “in high esteem”, and really sunk into oblivion? I would like to believe that this is not so. The film about the physics of a fragile body is not a visual martirologist, not a video dramatic panegyric, but rather-an attempt to bewitted peeping and the question of whether physics is able to turn into poetry today.

Cast: Igor Pomerantsev, Elena Shklovskaya

Director/Camera/Installation: Lidia Starodubtseva

Music: Alexander Shchetinsky, August Wilhelmsson

Media Topos Films 2015