Russia,
1997, 45 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
- dir
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Andrey Osipov
- prod
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Natalia Zheltukhina
- scr
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Odelsha Agishev
- cam
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Irina Uralskaya
- editor
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Irina Galinkina
- source
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Filmvideocompany RISK, 4/1, Likhov pereulok 4, Building 4, 103051 Moscow, Russia. FAX: 7-095-209-4055
- gga award
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Golden Spire, Film & Video: Biography
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COMMENTS
Screened with Silence and Harbor. Andrey Osipov in person.
OTHER
A camera glides through a deserted Russian villa filled with books, photographs and death masks—of Dostoyevsky (smiling!), Pushkin, Verlaine. From a long-ago silence, we hear voices. The house, on the beach at Koktebel, in the Crimea, belonged to the Silver Age poet Maximilian Voloshin (1877–1932); here, he and his circle laid siege to the new century before “reality became hostile, crossing [them] out of life.” In this house, the mysterious figure of Cherubina de Gabriac is conceived as a joke—only to take St. Petersburg by storm. (The “real” Cherubina, a poet far less glamorous than her name, is actually the portly Voloshin’s lover.) Director Osipov has found a perfect form for historical reenactment: no actors. Elegiac and experimental, with sly humor and unfeigned tragedy, the film uses portraits and fragments of old films as portals to an imagistic past. Like the poet’s “alchemist of yore,” Osipov revives Russia’s cultural heyday and the people who strove to make a work of art out of their life.
—Judy Bloch
FACTOID #68
Stanley Mosk, who later became a California state Supreme Court Justice, served as the general chairman at the 1967 Festival.
