2022-10-13 23:01:05
The Sevcable Port workshop in St. Petersburg now resembles a huge film studio: scenery has been mounted, storylines have been drawn up, mise-en-scenes have been thought out. In the center of what is happening is the St. Petersburg director Alexei Balabanov. The retrospective exhibition connected all the director’s films into a single story: here are little-known documentaries, and the art-house “Castle”, and the blockbusters “Brother”, “Brother-2”, and the philosophical road movie “I also want”, and even not released movies.
Every director has his own places of power. Balabanovsky Petersburg – both personal and cinematic – is mainly the addresses of Vasilyevsky Island. Having moved to the banks of the Neva, Balabanov lived here all his life and preserved in his films his native locations as they were in the 90s and zero. In this sense, both the location of the exhibition and the black bicycle at the entrance to the exposition are symbolic: Aleksey Balabanov had a similar one.
“He came, settled with me, traveled all over Vasilyevsky Island on a bicycle, watched, got used to, and then said, they say, that’s it, I want to stay here: they completely coincided with St. Petersburg,” recalls the story of Balabanov’s acquaintance with St. CTB film company and producer of almost all Balabanov’s films, one of the creators of the exhibition.
Despite a clear chronological structure, the travel exhibition created by Planet9 together with the CTB film company cannot be called predictable. Unexpected plot twists create a powerful whirlwind of ideas, characters, circumstances.
Each film is a kind of stopover. Its duration, as well as the duration of the route as a whole, the viewer regulates independently. The navigators of your crew are the sons of the director Peter and Fyodor Balabanov, whose voices in the audio guide set the tone of the journey. You can spend a whole day at this exhibition without noticing. But this path, like a conversation with an Eastern sage, allows everyone to take as much as they can now.
The portrait of the hero of the exhibition is made up not only of many hundreds of documentary materials, but also of emotions. The director’s sons share their memories in the audio guide warmly and reverently, Viktor Sukhorukov – with enthusiasm and excitement, Sergey Makovetsky – ironically and with a smile. And Alexey Chadov – philosophically: once, having already boarded the plane after meeting with the audience at the evening in memory of the director, he realized that he would very much like to know and feel how the main character of Balabanov’s “War” feels in the current situation.
“We sought to create a large-scale project that would not only show archival materials from filming, video installations, fragments from films, but where it would be possible to feel with all your senses inside the paintings of Alexei Balabanov,” says Tatyana Getman, the author of the project idea and curator of the exhibition.
Among the exhibits are Danila Bagrov’s knitted sweater and his player, Trofim’s bast shoes and Angelica’s blood-red shoes, the surveyor’s assistant’s cap and Lisa’s lace dress, typewritten film scripts and handwritten personal letters, faded photographs of half a century ago and perfectly preserved costume sketches.
Traveling through the world of the director and characters on a suburban train and yellow tram, we can look beyond the filming. The viewer is offered to spy on the creative process in the literal sense of the word: looking through the peephole made in an empty rusty barrel, we see a music box, and opening the mysterious door, we find props from the movie “Castle”.
For the sons of Balabanov, the most intimate exhibits of the exhibition were not those that capture the “stages of the long journey” of the eminent director, but touching personal relics. For Fyodor Balabanov, his father’s letter became such a relic. Fishing with dad was Fedor’s childhood dream. In 1994, on his birthday, he received a package from his father from Hamburg, where they were filming The Castle, and a letter promising to go fishing. The director did not succeed in fishing with his son, but that letter remained for Fedor one of the most touching memories of his father.
At this exhibition, Balabanov sounds like a “people’s director” in the full sense of the word: his films are presented in the audio guide not by film critics or members of the film crew, but by ordinary viewers. Acquaintance with Balabanov’s films found them in different life circumstances and emotional states, but for everyone it became a revelation.
As a result of “passing the route” each viewer develops his own portrait of the director. The territory of the exposition, limited by the walls of the workshop, in fact, connected several worlds under one roof at once, from the creative universe of Balabanov himself and the geographical landscapes of his paintings to the inner world of film characters. Finding himself at the crossroads of these roads and receiving quotes from Balabanov’s films as parting words, the viewer not only chooses the trajectory and pace of movement, but also discovers something in himself.
The main value of the exhibition is that its curators managed to create the contours of a film about the director, which the viewer finds at the time of editing – and gets the opportunity not only to evaluate this work, but also, if desired, to assemble their own version.
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