Program
The screening will be led by the curator of the Cinema Laboratory Tikhon Pendyurin with the participation of Dmitry Frolov himself.
Details
The retrospective will feature the film “Clownery” — an insanely decadent tragicomedy with elements of eroticism recreating the realities of the 1930s. February this year marks the 80th anniversary of the death of Daniil Kharms, and the screening dedicated to the memorial date immerses viewers into the atmosphere of the classic-of-the-absurd’s life-making.
Dmitry Frolov’s lens is aimed deep into time at the deceptive shadows of the Silver Age and surreal images of the pre-revolutionary years. The director transfers onto the Soviet film the thoughts and dreams of the poets of that era: expressionists, symbolists, mystics and futurists.
Frolov’s experimental and absurdist cinematography embodies the early cinema disposition to combine theatre, literature, music, and painting. In his films, the resurrected and exaggerated Art Nouveau, as if in a camera obscura, reflects the key moments of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Dmitry Frolov’s retrospective will open a large cycle of the Soviet parallel cinema screenings. In the months to come, viewers in St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Izhevsk will be presented with the underground experiments of St. Petersburg and Moscow directors who in the 1980s and 1990s subverted the visual canons of Soviet culture and changed the matrix of Russian cinema forever.