CINEMA

To make films, to record the process, to document — this has become part of almost every project I do. What is it, and why? Cinema is not merely a document, or a future archive. It is also an accompaniment to a given story, and a self-standing part of the whole. It is one more variation on a chosen theme, one more note in the score.

 

Whether I shoot myself, or work with a crew, I plunge back into the material — only now in a different language. The exhibition has long since been taken down; the works themselves may be gone; the very space in which the project took place may no longer exist, because the building has collapsed from old age, for instance, or has been subjected to an irreparable renovation. But you can watch a few minutes of that life, and there, in the frame, will flicker the house, and the works, and something else besides — everything that was caught back then in a certain intonation, a music, a mood, a voice-over, an angle, an edit.

 

And the five years spent within the walls of the Cinematography Academy (VGIK) had to find their way out somehow — if not into work as a production designer for cinema, then into the artist's own auteur cinema. What is more, in this form I am the one answering for the light, and for the camera, and for the edit, and for the script.