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| Alexander Rastorguev. |
NATURAL CINEMA (Translated by Anna Nieman).
Alexander Rastorguev is a documentary director with degrees in both philosophy and theater. His influence within the Russian documentary scene matches that of Pavel Kostomarov with whom he has often worked (wait for the second guest post to be published in a few days). Rastorguev's award-winning two-hour documentary “Wild, Wild Beach”(2005) is a powerful mosaic that lays out the sunburned humanity in all its unvarnished glory. Along with his earlier film “Clean Thursday”(2003), it’s a direct precursor to the current projects.
Anna Nieman is an independent film scholar, specializing in Soviet and Russian cinema. She graduated from VGIK in 1995 with a degree in Film Studies. Currently at work on her thesis, “Man of War: Films of Aleksey Balabanov in the Context of Post-war Russian Cinema”. Anna’s articles have appeared in “Art of Film”, “Caravan Magazine”, “Odnako” and MUBI.com.
This is the first of two guest posts by Anna Nieman: a translation of one of the most important film manifestos of recent years. Watch out here in a few days time for an interview that she conducted with both Aleksandr Rastorguev and Pavel Kostomarov. This manifesto was originally published in Seance.ru. A year later another statement this time co-authored with Kostomarov, was published on OpenSpace.ru
Published with permission Seance Magazine (copyright) http://seance.ru/n/35-36/portret-rastorguev/naturalnoe-kino/
The copyright of this translation belongs to Anna Nieman.
Consumed has
been the air
in which
a little boy
lives.
DocCinema
was seduced by the authorship, out of those who are still
around, of two great dudes:
Frank and Kosakovsky.
They both live
in the realm of guilt
on behalf of their world. The true, big grief of culpability.
From this almost divine feeling arises their reality.
It bears the moral imperative of communion.
Through
the communion
it brings forth
their personal Being.
Alongside they make their stand.
It’s not crowded there, I think.
Today’s
DocFilmProduction
is a waste
plant
documentary filmmakers are cloned
to the specifications of TV networks. It’s an ideological affront to the entire
film community in the form of a public auto-fellatio.
Manufacturing filmmakers with the
scope and talents to fit a certain slot - a logical approach of the
self-satisfying system.
Someone must
service
the traffic between the Kremlin,
money
and the communal trough.
“Actual Cinema”
the digital freedom with its
digi-communism.
There it is, our time has come.
We can do more,
we can make it more honest.
We can make it about today.
Although,
the kindest ones are running to
the old ladies for their tears,
the most talented ones to
formalism for the extraneous,
and all together to the rigged out
mannequins of the glamour revolution.
So where is that bitch, Reality?
Ain’t the bitch of kin to anyone?
Distrusting themselves, their own
hearing and voice.
Not one of them is screaming, by
Tarkovsky:
“I can speak!”
My God, if He exists, is a
suffering God. And He begins with a new paragraph.
For you it’s all a run on
sentence: eat, shit, love...
Monosyllabic and gleeful.
“Real Cinema”
Is already enslaved by its own
aesthetic.
“Real Cinema” is trying to pin the
tail of reality to the simulacra
of billboards. Change the vector.
Not “real”, not “actual”,
but
NATURAL CINEMA
Body of Pain
In “The Pathology of Russian Mind” it says: “The body of pain is the center of
universal objectivity”.
The birth of the objective world
occurs within the space of Naïve.
It occurs in the face of the pain,
out of the pain and through the pain,
it is found (meaning: finds
itself) around it.
Exists
beyond the pain,
but has its center in it.
Positioned in the realm of
non-pondering authenticity.
in the neighborhood of Being,
being-alongside.
Similarly, the universal
objectivity is located alongside with pain.
The pain itself being the
guarantee of the authenticity.
Taking care of authenticity
The sphere of being - the
language, the body of pain - the center of universal objectivity.
Existence and pain
A man coexisting with, but not
recognising his proximity to them: is the shepherd of being.
The possessor of the
pre-subjective corporeality.
The bearer of pain. Only with pain
can one enter the house of being.
The pain is the means through
which the truth of Being is revealed to a man.
“Standing in the lumen of the
truth of Being” demands pain and in itself is pain.
Pain
is a necessary condition for a human.
Then
Could cinema be a useless
and hollow business?
and hollow business?
Could it be yet
another surrogate for the rhetoric and ideology?
Could this
realm of humanity be surrounded to:
- that
blabbering ideological lip-service;
- that
biological kitchen enlightenment;
- that
socialised adaptive fornication in mechanical hands of the power
which have so
thoroughly and completely obscured the rare sparks of poetry and truth in
documentary cinema.
NATURAL CINEMA - is a cine-novel
Its artistic
basis:
an experiment of the pure aesthetics
and total anthropology.
Its core
methodology - “the essential action” .
It alone makes
up the dramatic fabric of a film.
Its pathos is -
an experiment of pure aesthetic
looking into
the face of humanity,
humanity
looking into its own face.
Given
the realm of freedom -
the realm of a
ledger of anthropological and moral experience.
From the
catalog of pain to the threshold of truth.
The essential action
demands to be
balanced and resolved within the fabric and geometry of its essence.
Thus arises the Hero.
The genuine
hero presents himself under the guises of a “superhero” of comic books and
fairy tales, and myths.
The hero is
defined by the action toward the world - his happening - the feat. The feat in
the form of discoveries, adventures, crimes, teachings - biography turned
destiny. The hyper-meaning of the feat - sacrifice.
The energy of
the sacrifice is the energy of the
action.
The text of the
essential action is always a technical explication.
A draft.
Technology of a miracle.
Non-fiction cinema meaning NATURAL CINEMA
as it is with
anything natural its cause is within itself.
In contrast to
everything unnatural, i.e. something that defines itself through something
else.
Natural cinema
as
speaking from
authenticity,
unfolding of
authenticity
in its
unquestioning of marks/forms.
Natural Cinema
AS
an active
anti-cultural venture,
adventure
(in existential
sense)
objectification of objectivity
through
humanising of a human
with the pain
of the existential truth.
The body of
pain prohibits
the Culture with its cult of the symbol.
The symbol
whose embodiment lies
beyond the limits of authenticity
and the reality
that it emulates.
The Symbol
whose embodiment consists of a void, of the essential inability to be filled
and the evasiveness of “what-ness”.
The truth of
human existence
and
the sour belch of the culture
are impossible
to combine under one roster.
The culture
that forces a man from his home bound path.
Of the mission of
THE NATURAL CINEMA
one should
speak in the spirit of Kant’s moral (sic) imperative
any action must
be directed at a man as the goal, and not as the means.
The icon and
the collegiality were “killed” by the book (that’s from Hugo);
the book was moved aside by the theater, and then auteur cinema; which in turn,
was enslaved by the technology and money.
And the only
answer to
the spiritual demand of the epoch
shall be the
natural cinema alone
- the cinema
that doesn’t root in the chronics, but becomes it;
- the cinema
whose interest has moved from the chewing zebras and dancing tribesmen
to the active
mining of the new moral experience,
to destroying
of the artificial horizon of the culture.
The only
possible strategy of such movement - is a strategy of the obscene, asocial.
The strategy of
destruction.
Strategy of pain.
Art is war
-with stability
of self-organizing social structures;
- with the
stultifying political correctness;
- with the
social complacency.
Art is
the fundamental
incompatibility
- with the
existing context of mass media;
- with any
current
for them
context.
The goals of art should
oppose the goals of authority.
Because
there are no
reasons for fairness, equality, brotherhood and such.
For happiness.
“Anti-humanism”
of existence itself, its indivisibility for evil, for “nothingness”, the
outlying of its truth, and that “standing in the lumen of the existential truth”
demand the
refusal:
from the
conventional ethics;
from the
socialised pseudo-morality;
from the
societal ideologemes.
Following Adorno
we must add to our strategical arsenal “scouring the art from the unconscious
impulses of the social requests”.
Art must be made the source of anxiety and discomfort.
Art must be made the weapon of social war.
Of course, it’s only a strategy.
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