Memory and voice

Radio Liberty is presented by the film "Time Esthel", created by the sound archives of our journalist Igor Pomerantsev

Radio Liberty represents the film "Time Esthel". It is based on the sound archive of the host of the program "on top of the barriers" Igor Pomerantsev . The director of the picture Lidia Starodubtseva explains the plan of the creators.

Two words, "memory" and "voice" set nearby enter the game of mutual roll calls. Voices are overgrown with memory, memory - voices. This is about this the film "Time has expired." However, not only about this. But also about listening. About the impossibility of forgetting the voice. About poetry and death. About the god of sounds. About labyrinths of words. About the Kafkian transformations: living in the dead, dead in living. And yet - about the magic of the radio. About its mysterious metamorphosis as a technical invention in the exquisite “Ars Acustica”, as if returning us to the original understanding of the unity of craft and art in the ancient Greek word “tech” (“τέχνη”). Radio is the art of memory. The picturesque memory is accumulated in Pinakothek, the book in libraries, the cuneiform - in glypttekhs. And the memory of the radio is stored in audio and acoustic archives - the cemeteries of the votes.

"I have an archive in my iron closet.

With him - a solid radio -development.

Every year it is more richer.

People died, and the voices are fresh, thinned. "

Thus begins one of the poems by the author of the idea and hero of the film-radio dramaturg, poet, essayist Igor Pomerantsev, for 35 years of work on the BBC (London) and Radio Liberty (Munich, Prague) of the unique radio march of modern poetry. In his "radio anthology of modern poetry" the voices of Joseph Brodsky, Gennady Aigi, Dmitry Prigov, Sergey Averintsev, Alexei Parshchikov, Vladimir Sokolov and many other authors who left this light sounded. The film "Time has expired" - the experience of visualizing this collection of "Voices of Dead Poets." Their poems come to life in filmed movie features: vinyl records and tape recorders, cassettes and electronic discs, computer audiograms, lips, floating lines, gestures of gestures. Probably the main paradox of such an experience should be in recognition of the inability to find a visual parallel to the voice. However, the cinematic counterpoint of sound and the image claims the possibility of this impossibility.

The film was shot in the Czech Republic and Ukraine. Among the locations of the filming are not only the Prague Radio Liberty and the homemade radio archive Igor Pomerantsev, but also the strange "places of memory": the cemetery and the temple, the observatory and the picture gallery, the mirror maze and the shadow theater, abandoned houses in the deserted streets of Prague. The spatial "displacement" of semantic and visual tricks reflects the directorial plan of the picture, which is based on a kind of genre deception. "Time Esthel" begins as a documentary: a calm and measured, rational narrative about the work of a radio journalist. But in front of us is only the apparent plausibility of the film -narrant, designed to lull the vigilance of the viewer. Absurd details are erupting through the outline of biographical documentary work on the craft of the radio: Gregor beetle (Radio Liberty Office is near Kafka’s grave), a portrait of Borges in the digital archive, the ears of knights and princesses on picturesque canvases, symbols of alchemy, astrology, and Chaldean science.

The script outlines the increase in the growth of irrational motives, leading to the double finale of the film. The first is absolutely allying. In search of a soundless god of sounds, the hero falls into a multi -dimensional labyrinth of mirror memory and flickering glare, is lost in his own reflections, gradually plunges into the acoustic abyss of the choir of poetic voices of the dead and disappears at the point of foreboding of the impending "end of time." The second final is on this side of the "Ruio". But the mood is the same, apocalyptic. The end of the radio program. Headphones thrown on the table. The empty armchair of the radio host. Metaphoric keys are more than transparent. "The Rest is Silence". The total victory of the deaf -mute over the memory of the voice. The microphone can only enhance the sound of viscous silence.

"Our time has expired": this is how the radio programs are completed. "Our time has expired": this is how life ends. Far from the point of emergence of the earthly perspective, it seems that time “flows” easily, carelessly and playfully. Such a molten, “current” time seems only to the surrealist “constancy of memory” or the eternal heraclites the flow of formation - the one that cannot be joined twice. But for the one who looked into the pupils of death, time does not “flow”. It "expired". Tears. Blood. "Time has expired" - the image of the gap. Pain. Cracks of misunderstanding. Deadline. The end of the day, year, life, century. But Raddrama has its own catharsis: the gift of the possibility of resurrection in an incorporeal, transparent, imperceptible ether. In open space. “The one who was on the air at least once, is immortal,” the hero of the film “Time has expired” claims, contrasting with the fact of the limbs of life in the great “tech” radio, which is able to preserve the memory of the voice and teach us to listen to the voices of memory.