A new modern art venue has been opened in Moscow in September 2008. It is called the Garage and is literally an old Bus garage which has been renovated and bought by the Russian billionaire, Abram Abramovich as prohect managed by his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova. However it is not simply an old garage for buses but one of the most outstanding industrial architectural projects of its day. The arage was designed in 1925 by Constantine Melnikov who was one of the most innovative architects of the post revolutionary period of the 1920s and 30s.
In 1999 The film “Architecture and the Russian Avant-garde” was shot in Moscow and is part of a series of six films by Copernicus Films about the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s an 30s. In the film I devote a large portion of time to this artist and architect along with Malevich and Tatlin whose artistic innovations and experiments contributed to the devlopment of Russian and Soviet architecture.
After I filmed the somewhat down at heel exterior of the building I could never of imagined that it would eventually be used as an art gallery in Moscow, especially for a gallery which will display wooks of art by artists who previously had to present their work through underground channels or abroad.
When I was filming it was still being used as a garage for the municipal transport system. I desperately wanted to film inside but was denied permission by the authorities. However the unique and innovative design was there for anyone to see. It is built in a series of parallegrams to maximise the use of space in combination with ensuring a high level of functionality. The growth of car and petrol driven transport required new and bold design answers to cope with the new technological phenomena. Melnikov designed several other garages in Moscow which still exist today and are still in use. Below are pictures of the Intourist Garage (below) with a sweeping circular window which houses a ramp leading to the various stories.
Other architectual projects include “Club Rusakova” (below) . Melnikov was against the use of flabby weak architectual design and prefered load bearing structures with a clear functional aspect but at the same time aesthetically coherent.
Melnikov also built his own house(below) in the centre of Moscow in order to demonstrate his design for circular homes. These buildings and many others also appear in the film by Michael Craig “Architecure and The Russian avant-garde”
For a review of the film “Architecture and the Russian Avant-garde” click here
This entry is a further sequel to my work with Akira Suzuki on the film “David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde”. At the end of last year and the beginning of this year we spent three months in Japan researching material for a film. While we were there we spent a great deal of time with Akira Suzuki who we interviewed in the film “David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde”. which is part of the series by Copernicus FilmsThe Russian Avant-garde – Revolution or Renaissance. The reason being he lived only ten to fifteen minutes from where we had rented an apartment for the duration of our stay. One Sunday morning he invited us to an open air antiques market in the grounds of the Sinto, Tomioka-Hachmangu Temple. We bought several items which were of interest to me and my wife. Among the bric a brac were old paintings, statues, chinaware and assorted vases and antiques. A short while ago Akira Suzuki contacted me with some startling news. At the very same market he had acquired a genuine David Burliuk painting (see picture below)from the period of his two year stay in Japan. To find a new painting by Burliuk is a rare event in itself but for one to turn up at such a market, moreover the same market which we had visited with Akira Suzuki, was astonishing. As I have already written early Akira Suzuki is a specialist on the work of David Burliuk in Japan and I had invited him to be interviewed for the film “David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant” on my first trip to Japan.
Even though the painting is a bit damaged a good art restorer would be able to bring the painting back to something approachng its original condition. Its difficult to say what the location is but it is tempting to speculate that it is a scene from Ogasawara, an island in the pacific Ocean where Burliuk and Palmov stayed with their families in order to paint much in the manner of Guaguin who went to live on Tahiti to find new inspiration for his work. It certainly resembles the island but it could be Oshima which they also visited. Akira Suzuki is not sure himself. It would be good to find out one way or the other
The second film in the series “The Russian Avant-garde” grew out of the first in that Rodchenko phot0graphed many of the new buildings which had been built in Moscow and which were themselves a product of the avant-garde. Through researching Rodchenko I quickly became interested in the Russian avant-garde as a whole and the outline of a second film had already began to emerge before the first was finished. I researched the buildings I wanted to film and spent a few weeks travelling across Moscow discovering where they were located and how best to film them. I really wanted to show the relationship between avant-garde art and its influence on architectural design of that period. I decided to structure the film around 3 main figures: Tatlin, Malevich and Melnikov. I wanted to start work in April using the same cameraman, Valentin Savenkov, as I used on the Rodchenko film. I also wanted to start in early April as some of the buildings would be hidden by trees once the leaves started to grow. We managed to get going in late April but because the spring is late in Moscow there was no real problem with leaves on trees. Some of the buildings were suffering from neglect as can be seen in the film but many were in remarkably good condition. Filming on the streets of Moscow is not without an occasional adventure and the Architecture film was no exception. The first problem arose when we wanted to film inside the house that Melnikov had built for himself, a construction of two cylinders inter-cut into each other. Valentin said that maybe Melnikov’s son who lives there now would let us film inside. It might seem amateurish, not having planned this before and then suddenly decide to knock on someones door on the off chance that they will allow us to film inside their home but in Russia this is quite acceptable. We rang the bell and the gate was opened by an eighty year old man who was Melnikov’s heir and son. Thin and wiry, he looked at us with a quizzical expression of curiosity and annoyance. Valentin explained the situation and then let slip that the film was about constructivist architecture. I knew this was a mistake and I was not making a film about constructivist architecture in any case. Melnikov’s son looked at us with a hurt expression in his eyes, saying, in an pained tone of voice, “Papa wasn’t a constructivist – Papa was an artist”. That was it, I knew we weren’t going to get in under any circumstances. I went back a few days later by myself and tried to negotiate with him but again it was no good. I could see he was tired of film crews and people wanted to look inside the building all the time.
Later there was a building which I wanted to film not far from Lubiyanka. It was a government building and I had already spotted a policeman standing nearby but before I could warn Valentin he had the Betacam out and up on the tripod. The Policeman waved his baton at us and Valentin took the camera off the tripod and we moved on. All in all it wasn’t a good day and I didn’t get everything I needed.
I decided to try and film some of the more difficult buildings with a smaller camera on my own which wouldn’t draw such attention to myself. I shot several buildings which I needed for the computer graphics which I planned and some of the buildings which I had missed the first day of shooting. I was filming a building in a quiet region of Moscow and gradually I could feel that people were checking out what I was doing. I had feeling someone would call the police. I just got everything that I need filmed and in the distance I could see a police car coming down the road. Fortunately I already had the camera packed away and was walking up the road towards were they were coming from and they drove straight past me. They stopped at the building where I had been filming and out of the corner of my eye I could see they were speaking to some one who came out of a building opposite. I dodged quickly into a small road between two buildings and walked quickly to the metro where I was able to blend in with the crowd.
The following day I went to Red Square to shoot some material. There I could happily pose as a tourist and remain relatively anonamous. Or so I thought. It was a very hot sunny day and I began filming around the Moscow Museum which faces onto Red square and Manezh square. If you have been to Moscow, Manezh square has an enormous statue of Marshall Zhukov on a horse. Within minutes I was surrounded by a group of homeless guys who wanted to know all about the project and spoke knowledgably about what were the best angles from which to film buildings. “We know everything about this place, we live here” which of course they did – literally on the streets. They probably wanted to help me for money but I did get the distinct impression that the just wanted to help me because they were genuinely interested in what I was doing. I talked to them for a while and then moved on.
A friendly faced thin middle aged man with a sun-burnt face, then stopped me and asked me to film him. “I’ve just spent twenty years in prison and I have come to Red Square on my first day of freedom. Take a picture of me so that there is something to say that I have existed”. He smiled amiably as I filmed him and then we parted. Five minutes later we bumped into each other and smiled foolishly at each other. Fifteen minutes later, again we bumped into each other, in a different part of the Red Square complex. We both stopped and he said to me “this is the third time we have met, lets exchange coins”. He gave me one ruble and I gave him one ruble from my pocket. “You’re a good guy” he said and we shook hands and I never saw him after that. I don’t know what the significance of exchanging coins is but it seemed very important at the time.
One of the main components of the film is the computer graphics. I had never worked with computer graphics before but I thought for a film about architecture it would be appropriate. I found a guy called Vladimir Sokolov who was recommended to me by a friend and I explained to him what I wanted to do. We worked out some simple story boards and he came up with what I think are some interesting graphics of Tatlin’s Tower and Malevich (see videos below) plus some others.
The film was complicated by the fact that I needed to change studios half way through the editing process and this led to a lot of delays. At that time I was less familiar with studios in Moscow than I am now and more or less had to go on other peoples recommendation’s. The studio I found was alright but I didn’t want to make another film there. Once the film was completed I was contacted by the International Festival of Cinema and Technology to submit the film for participation in their festival which was being held in Toronto that year. They nominated it for best documentary film in the competition but the prize went to another film.
Mayakovsky was probably the most problematical film to make from a number of points of view. Firstly Mayakovsky’s poetry is very specific and avant-garde although there are some very good translations in English. However I wanted to retain the original Russian to preserve the original rhythm of his poetry and this caused considerable problems. I had to understand the poetry myself in the first place before I could start working on the film. This is easier said than done when reading from the Russian. In addition to this I wanted to shoot in the The State Museum of Mayakovsky on Lubyanka and this required some delicate negotiations with the museum administration. In the end we agreed the terms under which I could film inside the museum but not without some restrictions. Also once again I had to find a new studio and also a new camera operator. In both these cases I was lucky. I found one of the most prominent documentary film cameramen in Russia, Slava Sachkov, who has long experience in the Russian film industry and is a director himself and a partner in the Film Company “Ostrov” in Moscow which made “Seven up” for the BBC and Granada TV, not to mention a host of award winning Russian documentary series. I don’t think I could have found anybody better and we immediately formed a good working relationship. We shot a lot of material around Moscow to start off with and then all the graphics, photographs and pictorial material from archives etc. On the agreed day we then went into the Mayakovsky Museum to film more material. Its one of the most original museums ever devised, designed in the a style of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s, with sloping floors and iron girders poking out in different directions It’s a vast constructivist ensemble designed to house the collection of Mayakovsky’s work and life in a way that on the one hand arrests the viewers attention and on the other deconstructs their visual sensibilities. One of the good things about the museum is that it is like a film set albeit a little unconventional and so it made an ideal place to film, lending a specific emotional atmosphere to the film. Mayakovsky had a room in this building on the top floor in which he ostensibly shot himself in the heart. In the 1970s the entire building on Lubyanka was taken over and converted into a museum dedicated to Mayakovsky. With Slava’s professional camera work we were able to get some unusual shots which I was able to use in several sequences in the film. Slava managed to get exactly the right balance between light and shadow to give the film the edge and atmosphere which I was seeking.
One of the things I wanted to do in the film was to use an actor to read Mayakovsky’s poetry. I thought this would be an easy thing to do but I interviewed actor after actor. Sometimes they had the right kind of voice a deep velvety bass but they were unable to catch the rhythms of Mayakovsky’s complicated imagery. Also Mayakovsky had a very specific timbre, powerful and rich, as he said of his own voice it could hammer rivets into steel plates. Mayakovsky’s live performances were notorious and nobody could better him in live debates and the futurist evenings at the Polytechnic Museum where the read out their declarations and manifesto’s. At first I couldn’t understand what the problem was with these actors until someone explained to me that in this new era, i.e. since perestroika many of these skills are being lost and younger actors no longer need or wanted to study the necessary skills for this type of reading. I decided the next best thing would be to actually find recordings of Mayakovsky himself reading his poems. I went to the All Russian audio archive in Moscow. They had some recordings of Mayakovsky but also other recordings of actors from the 30s,40s and 50s reading Mayakovsky’s work. Some of it was excellent and just what I was looking for and I selected about ten large fragments from Mayakovsky’s larger poems plus several complete poems such as “Could you not”. I wanted to include a fragment from the poem “Lenin” but there was no recording of this work at the audio archive. In the end I found an older actor called and got him to do some reading. He had a perfect voice and actually knew most of “Lenin”off by heart. He knew exactly how to use his voice and tailoring his intonation and vocal stylistics to great effect. The recordings where Mayakovsky is reading himself are not in good condition but the power of his voice and personality come through and the recordings stand in the same way as visual archive footage, which although sometimes in poor condition have a dynamism and authentic amplitude.
The film took a great deal of time and effort especially as I decided to make a Russian version as well as an English version. I felt this was necessary and I hoped to show the film to Russian audiences.
As with all these films about the avant-garde one film almost seamlessly leads into another and because Mayakovsky wrote many plays as well as poetry and was championed by the Theatre director Meyerhold, as a new Aristophanes, it was natural that the next film in this series would be about Meyerhold. Mayakovsky wrote several plays for Meyerhold, The Bathhouse, The Bedbug and Mystery Bouffe and while Meyerhold liked to have complete control of his productions he permitted to Mayakovsky to be present at rehearsals at all times and valued Mayakovsky’s contributions and observations at all levels of the production process
After a long and torturous route this film has finally been completed and released on Amazon as DVD. It is the sixth film in a series about the Russian avant-garde by Copernicus Films and the director Michael Craig. The film took longer than expected for many reasons. Firstly it was necessary to interrupt the editing to finish the film David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde(Also part of the series). secondly when it came to editing the material it was obvious that there would be a need to shoot more material. Also in a strange sense I wasn’t sure how the film should look or be. After making four films about the Russian avant-garde where the style was relatively similar, now I was confronted with a set of material and a subject which required a different approach and a different look but at the same time should integrate with the over all series. For this reason I embarked on finishing David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde and leaving the editing of Kandinsky until later.
As it turned out this was a good idea. When I returned to the Kandinsky film I had fresh ideas which were incorporated into the film. One of the central ideas of the film was a sequence where Kandinsky enters his studio and is struck by the sight of one of his paintings bathed in rays of light. He doesn’t know whether the painting is upside down or what the painting is supposed to depict. It was at this moment that Kandinsky took a leap forward in his search for abstract forms in art. In the editing of this sequence all the threads and various elements of the film came together.
The idea was to show the state of Kandinsky’s consciousness at the particular moment of illumination and to illustrate the accompanying transformation in his consciousness. How Kandinsky’s understanding of his own art transformed itself qualitatively to a new level.
From here the film became much easier to edit and eventually complete.
About the photography of Alexander Rodchenko and the making of this film in Moscow.
By Michael Craig
When I began to make films in Russia in the mid 1990s, I was prepared for all kinds of problems but none of the problems I subsequently encountered. I had already worked in the UK for many years in the film and television industry. I finally decided to move to Moscow to make films and to write. The first two years was a question of finding my feet both linguistically and culturally in a city and a society which was undergoing a total transformation. I had an advantage in that I had already learnt Russian language at school and also had worked in St Petersburg for almost four months on a BBC Drama in 1993. It was this experience which decided me to move to Russia, albeit Moscow. All the same there is a great difference between working in Russia with all the support that a paid position offers and actually living day by day in an alien environment. As I already mentioned the first two years were a case of acclimatization. Just as I ran out of money during my first winter in Moscow stuck in a tiny room in a large apartment built in the Stalin era, I was offered a job on a feature film “The Saint”. This got me through the worst deprivations of that first year. It wasn’t so bad in reality. The apartment was warm and the old lady who owned it, let me live my life as I pleased without interfering. As long as I paid the rent, that’s all she worried about.The job on the “Saint” ended and a BBC film “The Stringer” started shortly afterwards in Moscow and I worked on this film for the next six months and by the time the following winter arrived I was in a better financial position than the previous winter. I had also got into the Moscow rhythm of life so that even the financial collapse of 1998 passed me by more or less unnoticed as it did many Russians who considered it just another one of those things which they had to cope with. However I felt it was time to start on my own work and make a film. That was one of the main reasons I came to Moscow. When I was working in Warsaw I was introduced to Zygmunt Malanowicz, who played the role of “the young man” in Roman Polanski’s first film “Knife in the Water”. I asked him why he didn’t go to Hollywood with Polanski when he had the opportunity. He wasn’t able to give me a good answer but he said he was much happier making feature films in Minsk for under $70,000 than spending his time in Hollywood. It was one of those moments which opened my eyes to a whole new set of possibilities for making films outside the usual political system for raising money for film projects. Also the aesthetic of Eastern European and Russian Film making appealed to many of my sensibilities. So now I was in Moscow with all kinds of ideas for making films but where to start. I became interested in the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s and by chance picked up a book in the Tretiykov Gallery about the avant-garde artist and photographer Alexander Rodchenko. What attracted me to him especially was that he gave up painting for photography, denouncing paining as “finished” and unfit to express the modern social and visual realities of life in the early 19th century with its speed and industrial cityscape’s and mass culture. Photography he believed could better express and embody this reality and Rodchenko set about experimenting with new techniques of photography and photo collage, exploring new visual territory in his home in Moscow. What especially interested me about Rodchenko was that he denied the value of painting and art as a matter of principle and this I thought would be a good starting point for a film.I decided there and then to make a film about Rodchenko and his work. I gathered together some money and began researching Rodchenko’s work and managed to find a good camera operator, Valentin Savenkov. I wrote a script showed it to Valentin and worked out where and what in Moscow I wanted to film. This was relatively straight forward at that time.The first day of filming around Moscow was not good. After about an hour it began to rain and didn’t stop for four hours. I had checked the weather forecast but light drizzle was all that was expected. A week later we tried again. It was mid october and the weather was perfect. A deep blue sky, such as you only get in Russia at that time of the year when the air is cold, crisp and clear. Perfect weather for the kind of effect that I wished to bring to the film. Sharply defined edges of light and shade to give volume to the composition of shots and which would compliment Rodchenko’s photographs. One of the hallmarks of Rodchenko’s work is the balance between light and shade, volume and line all of which are contained within the composition of the photograph and its subject. Nothing needs to be added or taken away afterworlds, no effect or mystification is necessary everything exists already in the photograph and its compositional value giving a visual power and strength which is immediately apparent.The real problem came when I decided that I wanted to film a dramatisation of Rodchenko using an actor. I had a venue where I could film – a small room in a Museum which had a desk exactly like one in a photograph with Rodchenko working in his study.
It just needed a bit of rearranging and we were back in the 1920s. The hard bit was finding Rodchenko. Rodchenko had a shaved head which gave him a very distinctive look. It would have been possible to find any bald actor and film them in shadow or partly hidden so that the face was not important but just the over all impression. I interviewed actor after actor but it just wasn’t right. I was introduced to a famous Punk singer, Sasha Sclyr, who had also shaved his head. I met him but again it just wasn’t right. I began to get desperate. I found an American who seemed to fit the part but he disappeared almost as quickly as he appeared. I started to look for bald men on the streets of Moscow, on the Metro trying to gather enough courage to ask them if they would be interested in working on a film. The few attempts I made were not very successful. I began to contemplate using Yuri Lushkov, the bald Mayor of Moscow and drafted a letter which with the help of an influential friend I could maybe enlist him in the part of Rodchenko. I wanted to get on with the film and I was getting nowhere.I had given up, nothing was working. Then one evening I was in a cafe in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall waiting to meet someone and I saw that in an enjoining cafe they were filming something. Always interested, I walked round to get a better look. One of the actors that I worked with on the “Saint” was playing one of the roles in the main scene they were filming in the cafe. Suddenly a guy with a shaved head walked onto the set from behind the camera said something to the actors and walked back into the shadows from where he had appeared. My first thought was “its Rodchenko”. The resemblance was uncanny, not just that he had shaved his head but everything. In a free moment I caught the eye of the actor that I knew and asked him who is that guy. “He’s the director”. “Introduce me to him”. I said. I had to wait to the filming stopped and I was introduced to Anatoly Artemanov, the director of the film. Anatoly was a Russian Director living in new York and he had come over to Direct Russian in Moscow quickly explained to him what I needed him for and he immediately agreed and when I told him I had some money and that I could pay him he said “and you’ll pay me as well !- that’s even better”.This was the final piece in the jigsaw of the first film I made in Moscow and the film was completed with final editing and sound recording in March 1999. I found an English actor William Rousey, to do the narration. In this I was very lucky. He had studied at the famous Moscow Arts Theatre and so had a good grasp of Russian culture and the kind of voice that I thought would suit the film. I hadn’t intended to make any more films about the Russian avant-garde but as always one thing leads to another. The Rodchenko film was quite successful and the outline of a second film began to emerge about avant-garde architecture of the same period. This again would pose problems but of a very different kind.
Features of the Russian avant-garde.
Features of the Russian avant-garde. One of the important things to remember about Rodchenko and his co artists was that they sought to de-mystify art, to reveal its most fundamental character, its reality, exposing its materials and processes. And they attempted to engage the viewer in a direct and unmediated experience. There was no attempt to represent an outside reality or a reality which was doctored in the developing process, with the viewer responding only to what was in front of them. As a communist his idea of photographic truth would have satisfied many of Rodchenko’s ideological and concerns as well as his “aesthetic” quest for truth.Rodchenko used qualities already inherent in the subject – light,shade, volume. line, contrast etc and drew the viewers attention to these qualities by his system of Rakursy or perspectives i.e. using the angle from which the object is photographed to maximize the compositional value of the subject or the visual dynamics of the subject without falsifying it. In other words these qualities are already inherent in the subject and the camera is used merely to bring out these qualities in new and interesting ways – to make the usual unusual and and make the unusual usual. Rodchenko was against manipulating the technical capacities both in photography and and developing stages by interfering unduly in the process to produce effects, which would distort the reality of the subject. “Rakursy” exploited the visual “laws” already given in the everyday world as seen by human beings. The function of the camera is to exploit these laws, volume, light shade, rhythm etc) to the maximum advantage for presenting the subject to the viewer. Not arbitrarily as Rodchenko was often accused of doing but consciously and deliberately. As Rodchenko himself noted. “These laws have always existed even though they are hard to describe and explain.
For instance there is one picture of a diver on an ascending upswing before descending into the water. The diver is placed in the far right hand corner and the question arises why not in the center or in the left hand corner or to the side. Rodchenko consciously exploits two of the specific features of human perception.
In western culture we read from left to right. The placing of the figure in the top right hand corner creates a natural dynamic drawing our vision upwards to the rising figure. We seem to be looking up as if we were at the event itself staring up as a spectator even though we are looking at the photograph square on. Secondly the illusion of motion is purposely created from a still image, which at that time was an innovative and bold approach to photography which today we very much take for granted . Its not clear if they are connected but Rodchenko’s sketch on a note pad on the left hand side seems to show how important these geometric “laws” were for Rodchenko’ approach to photography.
Meyerhold’s task was to combine the three dimensionality of the actors body with the flat two dimensionality of the set design. In order to solve this problem he turned to the developments in the graphic experiments of the Russian avant-garde, people like Popova, Rodchenko etc. He also wanted to move away from a theatre based on words or text for expressing emotions and ideas, to a theatre based on gesture and movement in order to create and widen the possibilities for creating an emotional atmosphere in any given play. For instance Chekov wrote(roughly speaking) for one type of theatre which was actor/text based. It consisted of a series of exercises and movements in which an actor could collectively, either with a partner or a group of actors, develop non textual or non verbal ways of expressing inner emotions. Through the movement of the actors body, emotions which could not easily be represented by words i.e. crowd scenes or group or mass action revealed themselves on the stage. One of the first plays in which all these elements were synthesised was “The Magnanimous Cuckold”. Popova designed the set as a moving dynamic construction almost like a machine in motion. The actors deprived of any make up or costumes struggled to find their feet in this unusual set construction. Here however Meyerhold’s training of biomechanics helped and both actors and set were synthesised into one grand machine moving in unison to the rhythm of Meyerhold’s direction. In order to show how Meyerhold achieved this in a documentary film it was decided to use actors to “recreate” Meyerhold’s techniques. A simple solution was devised of filming the actors performances as shadows. We shot the shadows with an English actor in Moscow who had previously studied at the Moscow Arts theatre. We weren’t quite sure how to go about filming biomechanics so we improvised using the knowledge that we had. The idea of the shadows was to make the presentation more abstract and less concrete so that the emphasis would be on the movement itself rather than the person. This, as far as I understand was echoing some of Meyerhold’s ideas. Once again I asked Slava Sachkov to film the sequences of shadows. tried to move to a movement director based performance.
His productions included influences from Kabuki theatre which is based on mime and dance, the action developing around a series of gestures and poses as much as a result of the text of the play. With both of the above in mind, Meyerhold developed a specific training technique for his actors called biomechanics.
“David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde” was released on DVD in the autumn of 2007. The film charts the work of the Russian futurist David Burliuk in Japan. After he left Russia during the Russian civil war, David Burliuk spent two years in Japan and put on exhibitions in Tokyo, Kyoto and Yokohama. His influence on the growing Japanese futurist movement was immeasurable where he worked with Japanese artists such as Kinoshita and Murayama. The film features locations in Moscow, Tokyo, Kyoto and a small Island called Ogasawara in the Pacific Ocean which Burliuk visited in the manner of Gauguin.Japanese art was was gradually transformed in the Meiji period of the late 19th century and early 20th century after the Meiji restoration which heralded Japan’s entry onto the global stage.
Perceptions of Japan as a closed and traditional society changed in the aftermath of the Meiji restoration. There was a Rush to modernize and industrialize Japanese society. Someartists were beginning to recognize the hegemony of industrial society and its profound implications for art and culture. It spawned a counter culture in Japan with a tendency to rebellion by those who saw in modernisma progressive opportunity but also itstendency for alienation. However it was Burliuk who translated to Japanese audiences developments in Russian art .
After just two weeks inJapanhe had organised an exhibition inTokyoentitled “The first Exhibition of Russian Paintings inJapan” which opened on Oct 14that the Hoshi pharmaceutical head quarters in Kyoboshi. There are few records left of this exhibition but reviews described astonishing works of dangling socks and matchboxes attached to paintings and painting rendered on cardboard.
Part of the film involved visiting an island called Ogasawara which is situated in the Pacific Ocean about 1000 kilometres south of Tokyo. The Journey takes around 26 hours and can only be reached by ship. Burliuk visited the island and spent about three months there painting and relaxing after his mammoth journey through Siberia and onto Japan and the various exhibitions in Tokyo and Kyoto. It made a warm change from the icy blasts of a siberian winter. I had already decided that I would follow Burliuk’s journey to this island as well as film in Tokyo and Kyoto. I had already completed half the journey, albeit on a comfortable flight from Moscow to Tokyo. Now it was time to go all the way, as far as Burliuk himself went.
Burliuk was a keen student of Japanese culture and much like his idol Gauguin he immersed himself in Japanese culture and art. Interestingly enough Burliuk’s Journey to Ogasawara began when he left by ship from a point not far from where Basho started his travels in old Edo the former capital of Japan which became Tokyo. Basho was another wanderer poet much like Burliuk who was destined to travel throughout the world seeking new inspiration for his art and life.
I wasn’t sure how the Ogasawara material would relate to the rest of the film. In fact sometimes I doubted the wisdom of going there at all. This all changed after my interview with Akira Suzuki. A friend of a friend recomended me to interview him as a Japanese expert of Burliuk’s time in Japan in general. He writes about Burliuk’s work and art and translates his books from Russian into Japanes He as published several translations of Burliuk’s writings from Russian into Japanese as well as a number of books about Burliuk and Fialev, the Czech artist who traveled to Japan and Ogasawara with Burliuk. (Follow this link for more information about Akira Suzuki’s work). Akira Suzuki turned out to have a wide knowledge of Burliuk’s life and work in Japan, which very few people would have known if any at all. This inside knowledge and understanding proved invaluable for the film. This was especially true when he explained how Burliuk wanted to visit a south sea island and spend time painting there much like Guaguin. This was the reason he visited Ogasawara. Suddenly many things fell into place and I understood why Ogasawara would be important to the film and indeed the series about the Russian avant-garde overall. Burliuk was the Father of Russian futurism and was heavily influenced by Guaguin as was much of the Russian avant-garde itself either through Burliuk’s influence or generally through other artists.
Guaguin himself when searching for a new form of art drew upon Japanese art as a way of discovering a new style or a new direction in art. As he said himself “artists have lost, ……all their instincts, one might say their imgaination and so they have wandered down every kind of path in order to find the productive elements they hadn’t the strength to create”. Gauguin was the first European artist who consciously sought to synthesis the expressive means of various epochs and peoples with European artistic techniques, in particular the Japanese, opening up new possibilities for painting and art.
Burliuk also was forever seeking new rhythmical structures and innovations in his work, simple solutions for expressing new ideas and phenomena. In this the Japanese artistic values of the ornamental organisation of the surface of the canvas would provide him with ample material for study.
Akira Suzuki explained how Burliuk not only organised exhibitions and gave lectures, he thoroughly familiarized himself with Japanese life. He took care to understand a complicated culture full of diverse subtleties and nuances. Burliuk tried to penetrate the meaning that lies embedded in the aesthetic life of Japanese culture and art much like his idol Gauguin.
The importance of Gauguin for Burliuk cannot be underestimated. Gauguin was a precurser of the 20th cnetury avant-garde movementas a whole. His independent and bold search for a new form of art had an enormous influence on the development of the decorative principles of the Russian avant-garde.Far from the turmoil of civil war and revolution Burliuk believed he could live and work in an environment of relative safety.
All at once, talking with Akira Suzuki, the themes of the Russian avant-garde, David Bulriuk, Guaguin, Japan, Japanese futurism and a south sea island merged into something concrete and understandable in the context of a film and in particular a film about Burliuk and his relation to Russian and Japanese futurism.
From his writings we can imagine Burliuk’s thoughts as in the early morning light the ship approached Ogasawara. Coming out on deck he could gaze on the fantastic sight of an island he had never seen before.
Akira Suzuki was a knowledgable and relaxed interviewee. The thing I liked most about him on screen is his easy and friendly delivery. I had the choice of interviwing him in English or Japanese. In the end I went for the Japanese with English subtitles as his enthusiam and excitement for the subject comes through when speaking in his own language. This was exactly the mood I wished to create in the film and in this Akira Suzuki helped me a great deal. The things he knew about Burliuk had a personal quaility about it, one could feel that he had a strong attachment towards Burliuk and a feel for the subject as well as having engaged in the research. His anecdotes and stories about Burliuk in Japan could only have come from sources close to the Japanese.
On a later visit to Japan Akira Suzuki took myself and my wife Natalia to the very place where Burliuk boarded ship to Ogasawara. It is a quiet stretch of water in the heart of Tokyo. Later the same day he took us to a nearby region where the Hakia poet Basho lived and composed his poetry and from where he set off on his journeys around Japan seeking inspiration and enlightenment. I couldn’t help thinking of Burliuk who set off not very far from the spot where Basho undertook his spiritual journeys around Japan and wondering if Burliuk felt any connection with the great poet of Japanese literature given that Burliuk was as much of a poet as he was a painter.
A few days later Akira had another surprise waiting for us. He asked me would I like to see an original painting of David Burliuk which a friend of his had in his possession. Of course we jumped at the chance. The next day we arranged to meet and we all travelled by metro to Ikejiri-Ohashi.
A short walk from the station was a small modest shop-front gallery overshadowed by one of those giant exressways which are raised above the city on tall thick columns and criss cross Tokyo. We went inside and were introduced to a gentle mannered man in his late 50s who owned the gallery. After some tea and getting to know each other he brought out a cardboard carton and gradually took off the wrapping to reveal a beautiful unframed canvas of a village on Oshima in 1920 which Burliuk painted on one of his visits to the island. For the first time I realised why some people want to collect or horde great works of art. The magic of being close to something or someone through their work was literally breathtaking, especially somebody who I had been researching for so many months. It felt like small currents of electricty running through my spine. I thought I had come to know Burliuk quite well but gazing at a work of art which had been painted in Japan and which I could pick up and look and touch and feel, was a very different experience from seeing something in an art gallery and moreover by an artist of such stature in the Russian avant-garde. When I turned the painting round to look at the back, there in faded Russian and Japanese, was written, that the painting had been exhibited in the “First Exhibition of Russian Painting in Japan”. I and Natasha examined the painting for maybe half an hour. It was an experience that I didn’t really expect, in so far as looking at a painting can be such an energising event. It is something which is difficult to put into words
The second half of the film is about Burliuk’s influence on the Japanese avant-garde itself which was considerable. After he emigrated finally to America with his family the legacy of his time in Japan continued to live on and influence Japanese futurist artists like Kinoshito and Murayama who had a strong influence in all areas of Japanese cultural life – literature, architecture, the visual arts, design and to a large extent theatre.
The explosion of passions was reflected in the two exhibitions оf the Sanka association, in the second half of September 1925. Because “Sanka in the Theater” attracted wide attention, the exhibition was crowded with more visitors than the organizers had expected. Augmentedby an extra 122 works, this exhibition was the largest оf the avant-garde movement. Disparate media and subjects scandalized the public: а Dadaist assemblage of two ropes entitled Lumpen Proletariat Аапd B was executed by TokiOkamoto who had cometo the gallery and made it on the spot; the entrance tо the gallery was decorated by а large, three-dimensional hybrid assemblage; apart from these Dadaist pieces, somepure geometric works were also shown.
The exhibition was an experiment, a scandalanda social event.
The Japanese avant-garde attempted to cut across two opposing trends in Japanese art. The national traditionalist approach in art and the westernization of art which had gripped Japanese culture. Informed by Burliuk’s experiments and their own innovations they searched for new art forms which would liberate them from the confines of these two trends.Burliuk conceivedelements ofsurface plain, texture and colour as tangible elements in painting asserting the two dimensionality of the picture surface. Suchbold experiments in painting were readily taken up by Japanese futurism and the avant-garde in general giving the innovations of Japanese artists a global outlook and focus at a time when Japan was still emerging from a period of isolation and coming to grips with industrialization and its social consequences.
“David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde” was released on DVD in the autumn of 2007. The film charts the work of the Russian futurist David Burliuk in Japan. After he left Russia during the Russian civil war, David Burliuk spent two years in Japan and put on exhibitions in Tokyo, Kyoto and Yokohama. His influence on the growing Japanese futurist movement was immeasurable where he worked with Japanese artists such as Kinoshita and Murayama. The film features locations in Moscow, Tokyo, Kyoto and a small Island called Ogasawara in the Pacific Ocean which Burliuk visited in the manner of Gauguin.Japanese art was was gradually transformed in the Meiji period of the late 19th century and early 20th century after the Meiji restoration which heralded Japan’s entry onto the global stage.
Perceptions of Japan as a closed and traditional society changed in the aftermath of the Meiji restoration. There was a Rush to modernize and industrialize Japanese society. Some artists were beginning to recognize the hegemony of industrial society and its profound implications for art and culture. It spawned a counter culture in Japan with a tendency to rebellion by those who saw in modernisma progressive opportunity but also itstendency for alienation. However it was Burliuk who translated to Japanese audiences developments in Russian art .
After just two weeks inJapanhe had organised an exhibition inTokyoentitled “The first Exhibition of Russian Paintings inJapan” which opened on Oct 14that the Hoshi pharmaceutical head quarters in Kyoboshi. There are few records left of this exhibition but reviews described astonishing works of dangling socks and matchboxes attached to paintings and painting rendered on cardboard.
Part of the film involved visiting an island called Ogasawara which is situated in the Pacific Ocean about 1000 kilometres south of Tokyo. The Journey takes around 26 hours and can only be reached by ship. Burliuk visited the island and spent about three months there painting and relaxing after his mammoth journey through Siberia and onto Japan and the various exhibitions in Tokyo and Kyoto. It made a warm change from the icy blasts of a siberian winter. I had already decided that I would follow Burliuk’s journey to this island as well as film in Tokyo and Kyoto. I had already completed half the journey, albeit on a comfortable flight from Moscow to Tokyo. Now it was time to go all the way, as far as Burliuk himself went.
Burliuk was a keen student of Japanese culture and much like his idol Gauguin he immersed himself in Japanese culture and art. Interestingly enough Burliuk’s Journey to Ogasawara began when he left by ship from a point not far from where Basho started his travels in old Edo the former capital of Japan which became Tokyo. Basho was another wanderer poet much like Burliuk who was destined to travel throughout the world seeking new inspiration for his art and life.
I wasn’t sure how the Ogasawara material would relate to the rest of the film. In fact sometimes I doubted the wisdom of going there at all. This all changed after my interview with Akira Suzuki. A friend of a friend recomended me to interview him as a Japanese expert of Burliuk’s time in Japan in general. He writes about Burliuk’s work and art and translates his books from Russian into Japanes He as published several translations of Burliuk’s writings from Russian into Japanese as well as a number of books about Burliuk and Fialev, the Czech artist who traveled to Japan and Ogasawara with Burliuk. (Follow this link for more information about Akira Suzuki’s work). Akira Suzuki turned out to have a wide knowledge of Burliuk’s life and work in Japan, which very few people would have known if any at all. This inside knowledge and understanding proved invaluable for the film. This was especially true when he explained how Burliuk wanted to visit a south sea island and spend time painting there much like Guaguin. This was the reason he visited Ogasawara. Suddenly many things fell into place and I understood why Ogasawara would be important to the film and indeed the series about the Russian avant-garde overall. Burliuk was the Father of Russian futurism and was heavily influenced by Guaguin as was much of the Russian avant-garde itself either through Burliuk’s influence or generally through other artists.
Guaguin himself when searching for a new form of art drew upon Japanese art as a way of discovering a new style or a new direction in art. As he said himself “artists have lost, ……all their instincts, one might say their imgaination and so they have wandered down every kind of path in order to find the productive elements they hadn’t the strength to create”. Gauguin was the first European artist who consciously sought to synthesis the expressive means of various epochs and peoples with European artistic techniques, in particular the Japanese, opening up new possibilities for painting and art.
Burliuk also was forever seeking new rhythmical structures and innovations in his work, simple solutions for expressing new ideas and phenomena. In this the Japanese artistic values of the ornamental organisation of the surface of the canvas would provide him with ample material for study.
Akira Suzuki explained how Burliuk not only organised exhibitions and gave lectures, he thoroughly familiarized himself with Japanese life. He took care to understand a complicated culture full of diverse subtleties and nuances. Burliuk tried to penetrate the meaning that lies embedded in the aesthetic life of Japanese culture and art much like his idol Gauguin.
The importance of Gauguin for Burliuk cannot be underestimated. Gauguin was a precurser of the 20th cnetury avant-garde movementas a whole. His independent and bold search for a new form of art had an enormous influence on the development of the decorative principles of the Russian avant-garde.Far from the turmoil of civil war and revolution Burliuk believed he could live and work in an environment of relative safety.
All at once, talking with Akira Suzuki, the themes of the Russian avant-garde, David Bulriuk, Guaguin, Japan, Japanese futurism and a south sea island merged into something concrete and understandable in the context of a film and in particular a film about Burliuk and his relation to Russian and Japanese futurism.
From his writings we can imagine Burliuk’s thoughts as in the early morning light the ship approached Ogasawara. Coming out on deck he could gaze on the fantastic sight of an island he had never seen before.
Akira Suzuki was a knowledgable and relaxed interviewee. The thing I liked most about him on screen is his easy and friendly delivery. I had the choice of interviwing him in English or Japanese. In the end I went for the Japanese with English subtitles as his enthusiam and excitement for the subject comes through when speaking in his own language. This was exactly the mood I wished to create in the film and in this Akira Suzuki helped me a great deal. The things he knew about Burliuk had a personal quaility about it, one could feel that he had a strong attachment towards Burliuk and a feel for the subject as well as having engaged in the research. His anecdotes and stories about Burliuk in Japan could only have come from sources close to the Japanese.
On a later visit to Japan Akira Suzuki took myself and my wife Natalia to the very place where Burliuk boarded ship to Ogasawara. It is a quiet stretch of water in the heart of Tokyo. Later the same day he took us to a nearby region where the Hakia poet Basho lived and composed his poetry and from where he set off on his journeys around Japan seeking inspiration and enlightenment. I couldn’t help thinking of Burliuk who set off not very far from the spot where Basho undertook his spiritual journeys around Japan and wondering if Burliuk felt any connection with the great poet of Japanese literature given that Burliuk was as much of a poet as he was a painter.
A few days later Akira had another surprise waiting for us. He asked me would I like to see an original painting of David Burliuk which a friend of his had in his possession. Of course we jumped at the chance. The next day we arranged to meet and we all travelled by metro to Ikejiri-Ohashi.
A short walk from the station was a small modest shop-front gallery overshadowed by one of those giant exressways which are raised above the city on tall thick columns and criss cross Tokyo. We went inside and were introduced to a gentle mannered man in his late 50s who owned the gallery. After some tea and getting to know each other he brought out a cardboard carton and gradually took off the wrapping to reveal a beautiful unframed canvas of a village on Oshima in 1920 which Burliuk painted on one of his visits to the island. For the first time I realised why some people want to collect or horde great works of art. The magic of being close to something or someone through their work was literally breathtaking, especially somebody who I had been researching for so many months. It felt like small currents of electricty running through my spine. I thought I had come to know Burliuk quite well but gazing at a work of art which had been painted in Japan and which I could pick up and look and touch and feel, was a very different experience from seeing something in an art gallery and moreover by an artist of such stature in the Russian avant-garde. When I turned the painting round to look at the back, there in faded Russian and Japanese, was written, that the painting had been exhibited in the “First Exhibition of Russian Painting in Japan”. I and Natasha examined the painting for maybe half an hour. It was an experience that I didn’t really expect, in so far as looking at a painting can be such an energising event. It is something which is difficult to put into words
The second half of the film is about Burliuk’s influence on the Japanese avant-garde itself which was considerable. After he emigrated finally to America with his family the legacy of his time in Japan continued to live on and influence Japanese futurist artists like Kinoshito and Murayama who had a strong influence in all areas of Japanese cultural life – literature, architecture, the visual arts,
design and to a large extent theatre.
The explosion of passions was reflected in the two exhibitions оf the Sanka association, in the second half of September 1925. Because “Sanka in the Theater” attracted wide attention, the exhibition was crowded with more visitors than the organizers had expected. Augmented by an extra 122 works, this exhibition was the largest оf the avant-garde movement. Disparate media and subjects scandalized the public: а Dadaist assemblage of two ropes entitled Lumpen Proletariat А апd B was executed by TokiOkamoto who had cometo the gallery and made it on the spot; the entrance tо the gallery was decorated by а large, three-dimensional hybrid assemblage; apart from these Dadaist pieces, somepure geometric works were also shown.
The exhibition was an experiment, a scandal and a social event.
The Japanese avant-garde attempted to cut across two opposing trends in Japanese art. The national traditionalist approach in art and the westernization of art which had gripped Japanese culture. Informed by Burliuk’s experiments and their own innovations they searched for new art forms which would liberate them from the confines of these two trends.
Burliuk conceived elements of surface plain, texture and colour as tangible elements in painting asserting the two dimensionality of the picture surface. Such bold experiments in painting were readily taken up by Japanese futurism and the avant-garde in general giving the innovations of Japanese artists a global outlook and focus at a time when Japan was still emerging from a period of isolation and coming to grips with industrialization and its social consequences.
Below is a selection of Akira Suzuki’s work. He lives in Tokyo and is a one of the leading experts in Burliuk’s work and life with special reference to Japan. His research into this subject was featured in the film, about David Burliuk’s 2 year stay in Japan between 1920-22. Below is a clip form the film “David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde” which features an interview with Akira Suzuki discussing Burliuk’s work in Japan.
Akira Suzuki’s Translation into Japanese of David Burliuk’s book “Oshima” with commentary. David Burliuk wrote this account of the time he spent on Oshima.
In 1920 David Burliuk and Vacaslav Fiala traveled to Ogasawara with their families to paint and work. This is a translation from Russian into Japanese of their stay on this island which is roughly 1000 kilometres to the south of Tokyo in the Pacific Ocean. There is a commentary in Russian by Akira Suzuki and Nobert Evdaev. This is a comprehensive account of Burliuk’s and Fiala’s journey to Ogasavara with an extensive reference to Japanese archives
A translation of Burliuk’s story of life in Japan during his visit there
A translation of Burliuk’s work about the Crimea written in Vladivlastok just before he traveled to Japan
This is a translation into Japanese of the Czech artist Vacaslav Fiala’s account of his stay on Ogasawara. Akira Suzuki has translated this work into Japanese and included reproductions of Fiala’s paintings, drawings and engravings. The book is a perfect compliment to David Burliuk’s account of Ogasawara as the two men traveled together to paint on Ogasawara much in the manner of Guaguin who in the previous century traveled to Tahiti for new sources of inspiration and impressions.
Copernicus Films 