Moscow Archives- Moscow film chronicle

3D Visions at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

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An exhibition,  3D Visions,  at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is an exploration of the practice of giving flat images the illusion of depth. 3D is the new by word in film making and this article casts a new light on this phenomena. I read an article about the exhibition which prompted some new thoughts on the subject which hadn’t occurred to me before. 3D could become a way of exploring new visual and compositional possibilities in film making. The following quote from the curator of the museum, Junya Yamamine is particularly apt and revealing in this context. “that filmmakers are striving to make 3D an expression of a “world view” rather than just stringing together cheap visual thrills”. The next step, he says, is for creators literate in the technology to develop new forms of expression.  As a film maker this is one of the first sensible things I have heard out about how to use and develop this format. Rather than being afraid of this technology film makers ought to learn how to use it to extend their expressive possibilities whether it is in film, animation or trans-media projects. The expression “world view” in relation to 3D is especially intriguing and I would have liked Junya Yamamine to have enlarged on what he had in mind by such an expression. For my own part I am interested in the philosophical possibilities of film purely as a medium of expression, that is the ability of film to reveal or disclose a truth not necessarily in a narrative form but as a conceptual entity. Instead of trying to fit 3D into our pre conceived ideas of story telling maybe we should give it free rein to reveal its own interior power. This exhibition seems to be an attempt to do this albeit in the realm of photography.
You can read the full article here:
 http://arts-extra.ft.com/articles/visual/5a37a162-2004-11e0-a6fb-00144feab49a

St Petersburg Origins

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In the early 1990s Russia changed its political system radically and the Soviet system of government was replaced in favour of a new political path with aspirations to democratize its institutions along western lines and economic models of capitalism. A lot has happened since that time. I mention it here as I was in Russia at that time for nearly four months, in St Petersburg in fact, working on a film for the BBC. My experience during that time  had a huge bearing on what I am doing at the moment which is making films and how I am doing it.

While in St Petersburg in 1993 I was introduced to an English guy called Adam Alexander or maybe Alexander Adams I cant quite remember.He had set up as a producer come distributor in the city. He had bought a largish apartment and I was invited around to meet him on one of my few days off during the production. Adam was a tall blond guy with a naive welcoming smile and manner, lively and generous with his personality and keen to get to know people. He showed me around the apartment and in one room he had a whole editing suite set up. A moviola was set up in one corner and abetacam editing suite set up in another part of the large room. I was fascinated by the whole operation in this romantic and phantasmagorical city. It had never occurred to me that you could set up an editing suite and production operation in an apartment. Now of course with computers and non linear editing everyone is doing it. However it was then that I decided I would live in Moscow and have a similar studio set up in an apartment at some time. It was a dream and I didn’t really believe it myself but one which some years later has come to be. As I sit here looking out across a wintry night in Moscow from my 7th floor apartment with a couple of computers making up a the backbone of an editing suite with extra screens for monitoring and so on.
After I lived in Moscow for some time and it came time to buy an apartment we looked for somewhere  in the centre and quite large so that it could double as a studio and a place to live. That way I felt it was a more economically workable investment. We knocked down a few walls during the renovation so that the apartment could double as a living space and a studio.For more complicated  technical operations there is a studio not 10 minutes away which I can use whenever I need to.

The Museum of the East in Moscow

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The rain came to Moscow on Christmas day, melting the snow briefly before freezing into sheets of ice as smooth as glass on the streets and pavements. The trees turned into glass like sculptures as the water expanded into a transparent  coat of thick ice, covering the branches in a brittle quick-silvery casing.  Some trees have collapsed with the sheer weight of the ice. Many will struggle to recover when the ice melts having been denied oxygen for so long, unable to breath. No one remembers such a phenomena in Moscow and I certainly for all my years here cannot recall seeing such a thing, so beautiful and yet so damaging.
Natasha spent four days tending her exhibition of Ikebana at  the Moscow State Museum of the east in association with a Japanese artist who makes collage paintings with flower and plant material. I had to be there on hand as it were for emergencies and moral support.
The operator and director Slava Sachkov came to the exhibition with his wife Olga. A friend for many years in Moscow and camera operator on the film “Mayakovsky” and“Meyerhold Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde”, he had just returned from Vietnam for the ninth time. He is lecturing at a film school in Saigon and in seems to be single-handed helping to revive the Vietnamese film industry or so it seems to me. He stayed for a few hours and he talked about his work there and some of the visit he made to Hanoi. 
With time on my hands after Slava and Olga left, I wondered around the Museums labyrinth  halls. The collection is  is housed in the remains of a pre revolutionary classical building which had previously been the home of the Lunin family, whose most famous son Mikhail was a soldier, a poet and one of the leaders of the Decembrist movement. Its ornate pillared halls with 6 meter ceilings still retain their imperial grandeur of those far off days. I wandered alone most of the time through the muted interiors which house the different collections: The Iranian collection of paintings and cloths, swords and armour and costumes, the inheritance from another empire: the Chinese gallery with its scrolls and hundreds of sculpted  ornaments and figures made from ivory, jade and other rare stone material. Two galleries are devoted to Japanese art. In one hall there is a row of beautiful engravings on one side and   a series of calligraphy scrolls on the other wall. The centre piece in a huge glass case is a metre high ivory eagle in pose with wings outstretched as if to take flight.
As I walked by the mute exhibits, I tried to imagine if the pre revolutionary inhabitants ever imagined that their home would one day house a museum. The ghostly silence of each hall seemed to suggest they had not anticipated such a fate but were nonetheless content that the house was still standing and of benefit  to the thousands of visitors who pass through these halls to witness Russia’s intimate connection to the East.

16th December 2010 – Every Cloud

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Out in Moscow on a cold December morning trying to pick up medicine for the flu which everyone here is suffering from. 9.30 AM on VDNX, the Moscow region  a district which served as an exhibition centre for the technological, scientific and cultural achievements of the USSR. Each republic had its own building in the complex which stretched across tens of acres. It was a kind of showcase for everything the USSR felt proud of. It was built during the Stalin period and added to in the Brezhniev era. Now it is a vast market place for selling and exhibiting the newest capitalist products from the west.
I can never seem to get my bearings when when I exit from the metro on VDNX. Fortunately Natasha had given me good directions and I exited from the metro entrance into the wintry, misty sunlit expanse that is Moscow. As Natasha had promised the raised highway was on my right and the hilly open ground topped by an orthodox church was on my left. It was the church which attracted my attention, its reddish brick exterior and onion domes were not unlike any other church of comparable size and character which can be found in Russia. However it was bathed in winter sunlight which descended through the misty cloud cover, revealing it in an ephemeral light which was only dimly reflected up from the snow covered expanse of ground which surrounds the church. My reaction was immediate and clear. This scene would fit neatly into the Stanislavsky film“Stanislavsky and Russian Theatre”. I made a mental note to myself to return on a similar day with similar weather conditions and film the scene. It has since been added to the list of locations for the film.