Dau

Started by wilder, October 25, 2015, 05:31:39 PM

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wilder

Quote from: wilder on May 25, 2015, 10:19:38 PM
This Russian movie Dau by Ilya Khrzhanovsky sounds insane





Start at 6:57


QuoteROSENBERG: The film - a period piece about a mid-20th century Soviet scientist - was known simply as "Dau." Its director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, had only one previous title to his credit. But now, supplied with a seemingly endless amount of money from various investors and four years into the production with no end in sight, Khrzhanovsky has supposedly gone mad with power, insisting that his cast and crew live full-time on an increasingly large and elaborate set, cut off from the outside world.

IDOV: It was 1 a.m. and even at 1 a.m. it was huge and it was populated. There were janitors in Soviet dress sweeping the streets. There were militia men in Soviet uniforms patrolling the perimeter, just sort of, you know, imbuing it with some sort of crazy authenticity. And you might ask when was he directing and the answer is he wasn't. That whole month the cameras weren't rolling.

ROSENBERG: In other words, most of these actors weren't actually actors at all. Or if they were they weren't acting anymore. The janitors, the barbers, those were their real jobs now. They worked and even lived on the set whether Khrzhanovsky was shooting or not. As if to prove it, he would take Michael into structures which Michael thought were just facades, but which proved to be fully functional apartment buildings, complete with 1950s refrigerators stocked with 1950s food, stamped with 1950s expiration dates.

more here and here

An update on the post-production process

jenkins

after i realized the video was from May i read the article. this is something. this movie could have its own thread.

QuoteOthers have seen Dau as a realisation of the gargantuan theatrical folie de grandeur portrayed in Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York; except that there are few professional careers at stake beyond Khrzhanovsky's own, and thus no equivalent to the plaintive cry of the actors to Philip Seymour Hoffman's director: 'When are we going to get an audience in here? It's been 17 years.' It hasn't been 17 years, though it has been long enough for the country where it was conceived to invade the country where it was filmed.

wilder


wilder

An update:

QuoteIn 2017 The Telegraph reported that the film is still being edited and the production company is quoted as saying, "Our project consists of over 700 hours of material all shot on 35mm out of which the company is making feature films, TV series and a slate of science and art documentaries, as well as a trans-media project".

Lottery

This sounds insane and utterly fantastic.

Good value too with all that additional media being created.

Kinda reminds me of Tati with his Tativille set.

I love the idea of building the world and having the freedom to move in all directions and create a story from setting.

Cool stuff.

wilder

#5
To be released in the fall of 2018

13 feature films and multiple tv series

Official site


wilder

The first feature film recently screened at Berlin




'DAU. Natasha': Film Review
By Guy Lodge / Variety

The first feature film to come out of the vast, peculiar DAU art project offers a taste of the whole endeavor's impressively oppressive Soviet world-building.



Director: Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Jekaterina Oertel
With: Natasha Berezhnaya, Olga Shkabarnya, Vladimir Azhippo, Luc Bigé, Alexey Blinov
2 hours 14 minutes

There's a school of critical thought that believes no contextual details or backstory to a film — be they to do with its source material, the circumstances of its production, or its makers' motivation — should be examined or factored into a review of it, that the final product up on the screen is the only thing that counts. In many cases, that's correct. It's an all but impossible approach to take, however, to "DAU. Natasha," the first theatrical feature to emerge from the mammoth, multidisciplinary DAU art project — equal parts long-term film shoot, performance installation and "Truman Show"-esque anthropological experiment — intended to recreate the experience of everyday life under Stalinist oppression in a vast, fictitious Soviet research institution in the 1950s.

Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel impressively punishing chamber piece is ostensibly self-contained, yet to view it with no knowledge of the DAU project feels tantamount to framing a single square inch of a large-canvas painting. As a sample of endeavor's uniquely ambitious aims and eccentric execution, "DAU. Natasha" is thoroughly persuasive. A close-up character study of an institutional canteen waitress alternately seduced and abused by the scientists and officers she serves, it's atmospherically vivid and emotionally agitating, and much of the suffering on screen feels duly lived rather than merely performed: an über-highbrow reality show of mindbogglingly elaborate conception yielding an experience of utterly authentic artifice, or vice versa.

Whether it would feel any less of these things if it were merely a conventionally scripted drama — as opposed to the outcome of two years' filming on the largest film set in European cinema history, with non-professional actors recruited to effectively live as their characters the entire time — is open to question. The very existence of "DAU. Natasha," in all its absurd, imposing, cement-heavy glory, is its principal achievement. Its presence in the Competition selection of this year's Berlinale, moreover, brings the whole bizarre DAU universe into the (highly relative) mainstream: It's doubtful, however, that many standard theatrical distributors (or streaming platforms) will be willing to spring "DAU. Natasha" on unsuspecting audiences.

Not that you need any advance knowledge of the project to follow its grim, simple setup, painted as it is in gray minimalist strokes. In the aforementioned research facility — what is actually being researched is held in macguffiny shadow — middle-aged, unmarried Natasha (Natasha Berezhnaya) spends her days running the canteen for the company's boorish, demanding male staff and occasional outside experts, and we watch her tedious regimenof serving, clearing and cleaning with "Jeanne Dielman"-style dedication. Joys in her life are few: Non-working hours are largely spent in the closed canteen, drinking and kvetching with her younger colleague Olga (Olga Shkabarnya), despite the fact that the two women openly despise each other.

Respite comes in the form of visiting French scientist Luc (Luc Bigé), who's no Valentino but a veritable catch compared to Natasha's regular customers. He seduces her, sleeps with her and departs, leaving her vulnerable to the suspicious scrutiny of her KGB overlords, who fear she's involved in some form of espionage. Cue an extended interrogation by unforgiving general Azhippo (Vladimir Azhippo), which devolves into a wince-inducing bout of nakedly misogynistic humiliation and torture — plainly intended as the film's central talking point, though more seamily grueling than it is genuinely subversive. As a small-scale enactment of the cruel, debasing effects of totalitarian power, it's suitably and viscerally pummeling, though not in any specifically pointed political sense: The DAU project is too large-scale an exercise in world-building for this convincingly accomplished extract to accrue its own subtext.

A selection of other, less feature-formatted DAU films were screened last year as part of an immersive gallery experience across multiple Paris venues. "DAU. Natasha" may eventually figure into future such installations, though as a 134-minute feature with a clear, if stark, narrative throughline, it risks falling between two stools: It's not exactly suited to passing museum-piece scrutiny, though as an individual film, shorn of context and dialogue with its strange artistic mothership, it's surprising how much less inspires rather less awe and curiosity than the whole.

It plays, for better or worse, as a more conventionally challenging arthouse endurance test, steeped equally in stern Russian formalism and Dogme 95 austerity. On those terms, it's rather good: well-acted and well-made in its requisitely dour (or should that be DAUr?) way. Jürgen Jürges' dizzily inquisitive camera pries into the grimiest corners of the whole project's astonishing production design — built on the premises of an abandoned swimming pool in Kharkiv, Ukraine — and the exhausted visages of the actors alike.

Are they actors or subjects? The ensemble certainly doesn't want for intense, vanity-free commitment to the cause, particularly market-worker-turned-experiment-volunteer-turned-leading-lady Berezhnaya in the beleaguered title role. She's wholly in the moment throughout; for two years, working daily at this imagined Cold War canteen, she had no choice but to be. She weathers the physical ordeals she's put through with enough emotional tuning and intuition to hold at least some concerns about the exploitational nature of the entire enterprise at bay, but not entirely.

Still, the egged-on interrogation scenes linger in the mind less than her roaring, glass-smashing love-hate confrontations with the equally formidable Shkabarnya: The pair paint such an arresting portrait of two women at once beholden to, and screwed by, the system that you want to zoom in closer, to see their whole lives outside of the institute. That, of course, would go very much against the project's whole brief: It's some testament to "DAU. Natasha's" acrid, aggravating power that we end up as desperate as its protagonist to escape the institute.

WorldForgot


wilder

Ugh. That review did seem well-written. I have to admit I'm still intrigued by the stills (and overall idea of the film), which don't make it appear as flat and overlit as that writer describes.





Will reserve judgment until I see it, myself.

Degeneration is available to rent from that second link for $3. Do I trust the site? I don't know if I trust the site.

WorldForgot

Haha, I eagerly await your opinion on it.
Maybe buy into the site once Natasha and Nora Mother go up?

I agree that it's all quite enticing. Production conception alone, this iz sort of unrivaled.

wilder

Found some clips:














Quote from: Siddhant AdlakhaKhrzhanovsky's apathy toward his characters becomes apparent early on, when the camera remains at arm's length to observe and manipulate situations from afar.

This sounds like projection, to me, based on an understandable distaste for the method the performances were allegedly captured by. In terms of the framing, you might propose the same about Haneke, if you don't like Haneke. I do.

Quote from: Siddhant AdlakhaWith multiple 35mm cameras running around the clock, capturing highly improvised scenes, the film doesn't feel like a crafted drama — it's more like an episode of Big Brother, without the interview cutaways.

But it's not, based on these clips. There's camera movement, motivated by character action.

Quote from: Siddhant AdlakhaThe real subject of Dau is Khrzhanovsky himself, standing just behind camera; on set, he demanded he be addressed as "the head of The Institute," or simply "the boss."

Given the subject matter, wouldn't this work for the material? A stand-in for the slow march toward authoritarianism?

Quote from: Siddhant AdlakhaIn one instance, the camera lingers over Natasha's shoulder, as Olya — who Natasha has manipulated into getting drunk — rushes to vomit in a nearby sink. In the other, the camera sits right by the cheek of an imposing Soviet intelligence officer, Azhippo (Vladimir Azhippo), as he interrogates Natasha for sleeping with the foreigner. These are only times the film feels at all subjective, like it's exploring a narrative point of view, rather than photographing a diorama. In either case, the camera sides with characters at their most disdainful, as they coerce consent in order to dominate their inferiors.

Again this sounds thematically sound.

Quote from: Siddhant AdlakhaThe film has no real conclusion either, beyond portraying the authoritarian pressures the Dau experiment created.

[...]

It's not only excessive, it's artless. Khrzhanovsky has little to say with these explicit encounters, and his distant approach to his characters continues to reduce them to their roles within the state: as workers within a hierarchy, as objects of sexual manipulation, and as subjects of violent experiments. In this regard, he succeeds, but success in merely re-creating a fascist enterprise for long periods isn't just morally repugnant.

Is it?

The film may still be bad, but in re-reading the review after watching the clips my impression is that that writer dislikes the films on the basis of them failing to moralize.