New book from Michael Craig “Blok, Meyerhold and The Fairground Booth”

Announcement of my new book “Blok Meyerhold and The Fairground Booth which was published a few weeks ago. The book is now available on Amazon. Blok wrote the play The Fairground Booth in 1906 in the wake of the 1905 revolution which was seen as a precursor to the 1917 October revolution. As Blok himself said it seemed he “dragged it up out of the police department of his soul”. The play itself was received with a mixture of derision and delight when it was first performed by Blok and Meyerhold in 1906.
Blok and Meyerhold’s production of the The Fairground Booth was one of those seminal plays which changed the whole direction and context of theatre in Russia. Meyerhold’s subsequent innovations had an impact not simply on the course of Russian theatre but also to a large extent influenced the direction in which other directors developed their ideas and work. The Fairground Booth was a prototype for the explosion of theatrical innovations spearheaded by Meyerhold but it also inspired such directors as Tairov and Vakhtangov.
This book is not intended as an interpretation of the play as such but is written with the aim of creating a context in which this enigmatic and often overlooked play can be understood and enjoyed.

Over the next few months I will be adding material to this blog as a suppliment to the book. Many of the themes in the book such as the theatre within a theatre and Blok’s other plays and their significance for theatre will be addressed as part of a continuing flow of information  connected with this book. If you wish to purchase the book more details can be found here or by clicking on the thumbnail on the righthand  side of the blog.

Filming in Russia

With regard to filming in Russia, Michael Craig first worked on a sprawling BBC drama in St Petersburg twenty years ago. We filmed everywhere from morgues, to hospitals to the main police headquarters and even the prison, as well as locations all over the city. With a crew and actors of 140 or so the main problem was finding enough food to feed them each day over a three month shooting schedule when food was not easily available in those days. No one could say it was easy but then this was the early 90s. The last day of shooting coincided with the storming of the White House in Moscow, so conditions were not ideal.  However despite all the problems the film got made and was within budget. Things have changed a lot since then.

When Michael Craig first moved to Moscow and was invited to visit Mosfilm, the studio was in quite a dilapidated state and morale was very low. A year or so ago he was invited to the Mosfilm studio as part of a delegation of diplomats to view the studios with the aim of showcasing Mosfilm and its facilities. Karen Shakhnazarov, the Russian director had been charged with the revamping and modernisation of the studios a few years previous. The transformation was astounding. The grounds had been neatly laid out, new buildings had appeared and old ones had been completely  renovated and updated. The sound studios (the biggest in Europe) had been updated to the highest standards and a whole 19th century Russian town had been built as a set in the grounds of the Mosfilm complex. It displays a commitment to and understanding of what a foreign film company would require to make a film here in Russia. 

As a director, Shakhnazarov set himself the task of outfitting Mosfilm with equipment and standards which he himself would want for any film he would make. With this in mind he went about the task of changing Mosfilm into a world class film making facility. The transformation of Mosfim is indicative of the new conditions which make it a great place to make films

Since that time Michael Craig has been involved in several large scale productions in Moscow as well working with numerous smaller companies and organisations in Moscow. Michael Craig founded Copernicus Films which has made eight documentary films independently in Moscow, an opera and interviews and journalistic projects.  With the right guidance and support anybody can have a positive experience making films in Russia in a stable environment. Michael Craig and Copernicus Films’s twenty years working here in Russia, making contacts and establishing a sound business base has given him the insights and experience to offer such a service and benefit those companies or individuals wanting to come here and shoot a film project. No project is too large or too small for us and advice can be tailored to individual projects as required.

Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography

5 Oct. 2013 – 12 Jan. 2014

Kjarvalsstaðir

In October a retrospective of the photographs of Alexander Rodchenko, one of the leading  Russian artists of the first half of the 20th century, will open at the Reykjavík Art Museum’s Kjarvalsstaðir site.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1891, Rodchenko worked in Moscow as an artist and designer from 1915. He used many different media in his art: he started out as a painter and sculptor, then moved into photography in 1925.  He was a pioneer in photography and graphic design, designing for instance book covers, posters and advertisements in collaboration with Varvara Stepanova, his wife and closest colleague. The posters are among Rodchenko’s best-known works, and remain inspiring nearly a century on.More information about the film Alexander Rodchenko and the Russian Theatre can be found here

J-FEST Moscow 2011. Festival of Contemporary Japanese Culture

J-FEST was a festival of Contemporary  Japanese culture held in Moscow at the Central House of Artists. It was designed to showcase or present Japanese culture with an emphasis on youth and young people with the accent on phenomena like manga and anime, cosplay etc. The event was held in the House of Artists in the centre of Moscow. I wanted to the film the event partly out of curiosity and partly to collect material for the Japan-Philosophical Landscapes project and maybe get an interview or two with some of the main participants and speakers at the event. We arrived an hour or two after the event had started and I was surprised by how many people had turned up. Several hundred people were milling around the foyer and in the various exhibition points where events were being held.

A fashion show was just ending in the DNK hall with fashions from the Harajuku area of Tokyo. Outside in the foyer young Russians dressed in various costumes of manga and anime style were thronging around the two floors where the event was taking place. On one side of the foyer a whole wall had been given over to Kyoto Seiko Universtity  with a video instalation dedicated on the theme of the recent earthquake and a mural being painted by students from the university.

The costumes were various but mostly on the themes of maids, cosplay, anime and manga with a strong influence of gothic but generally recognisable as derived from the  street fashions of Harajuku.

At the press conference the panel consisted of the architect Takayuki Suzuki and May J the singer who heads the show J-Melo on NHK . J-Melo is a cult musical TV show Japanese TV channel NHK. It is broadcast in 180 countries and regions, and finally made ​​it to Moscow.  May J.  is of Japanese, Iranian, Turkish, Russian, Spanish and English extraction.

It was strange to see these symbols and emblems of Japanese culture being played out in Moscow but one way of understanding this phenomena is with reference to Takamasa Sakurai was also on the panal. A journalist and a media content producer – he is convinced that the world will certainly have a “kawaii revolution.” He is convinced that due to the popularity of their pop culture, Japan could become a diplomatic mediator between different countries. In recent years, Sakurai-san has been an active lecturer in various countries.

The next day of the festival I managed to secure an interview with Takayuki Suzuki

Suzuki-sensei is trying to reconcile  modern building and new forms of the 21st century with traditional Japanese ideas of beauty. Thus, in their universitybuilding,  which he designed,  he tried to include as much as possible, “the sky” which “need students to dream.”
    In his lecture he spoke  about contemporary Japanese landscapes from the perspective of Japanese culture.
    Takayuki Suzuki: “Situated in the Far East, modern Japan is one of the centers of world culture and therefore for understanding the future we need to talk about the features of Japanese culture, characteristic of the Japanese urban landscape and everyday life of Japanese youth”.

After his interview I am hoping to use some of the material for the project Japan Philosophical Landscapes. His work and ideas may form the nexus between traditional and contemporary understandings of landscape and pinch  together these two major themes in the film.

Update: Autumn Grandeur in Moscow

Posted on September 12, 2011 by copernicusfilms| Leave a comment

A brief update. Will follow up on location for Fairground Booth film maybe Tomorrow. Other work continuing on scripts for “Carnival in Russian Theatre” and Vahktangov documentary. Worked most of the weekend updating blogs and internet sites social media etc Plus some experiments in filming with green screens and lighting. Reading Gogol as background material.

Things gradually taking shape on this film project although I’m still no nearer to getting back into the Moscow rhythm since returning from the dacha outside Moscow. All across Moscow rolling dark clouds pass by my apartment window high up on the seventh floor perched on a hill a few minutes walk away from the Moskva River, in a vast panorama of Moscow and it distant environs. Beautiful in its seemingly threatening grandeur. Moscow has expanded over the centuries in concentric rings and it seems like our apartment sits at one of the epicentres of the first ring. The scene outside is a sure sign autumn is here.

St Petersburg Origins

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 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 and light haired 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.

Stanislavsky Documentary Film – Copernicus Films – Update

Just back from the UK after accomplishing several important steps in the progress of this new documentary film about Stanislavsky of his life and work. The one major accomplishment was securing the interview with Jean Benedetti, one of the foremost international authorities on Stanislavsky, which will be included as part of the film. After a period of negotiation the interview took place with Jean Benedetti at the beginning of May 2010. Instrumental to this process was the help of Paul Fryer of the Rose Bruford College of acting and Andrew Eglinton also from Rose Bruford College and who runs The London Theatre Blog. Paul Fryer is also curator of The Stanislavsky Centre which houses one of the largest Stanislavsky archives outside of Russia and is a major resource for research into Stanislavsky. Andrew made sure that the logistics side of things were in place as well as playing a main role in the recording sessions which took place at Rose Bruford College and advice about archive material. On returning to Moscow the production will continue with more filming and locations in Moscow as well as negotiations for archive footage. Post production and editing for the film is planned for the middle of June and will continue throughout the summer.

David Burliuk and Gauguin in Film

In 2008 Bob Duggen reviewed the film “David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde on artblogbybob. His comments about the section which referred to Gauguin in the film led to a reassessment of the way the whole series of documentary films called The Russian Avant-garde – Revolution or Renaissance. was constituted, of which “David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde” is a part and was produced by Michael Craig and  Copernicus Films in 2007. On his site, as well as commenting on the quality of the photography in the film, Duggen explained that he was especially interested in the part of the film about David Burliuk and his trip to Ogasawara, a small Japanese island in the Pacific ocean about a thousand kilometres south of Tokyo.   David Burliuk admired and drew inspiration from Gauguin. In 1920, after several successful exhibitions in Japan, Burliuk traveled to the Ogasawara islands  to recuperate after his gruelling journey through Siberia  and paint in the manner of Gauguin who also traveled to the island of Tahiti in the early 1890s in order to develop what he believed would be a new art for a new era. Gauguin was himself also strongly influenced by Japanese art and this overlapping of interest in the film was of particular interest to Duggen.

When this section was included in the film, not only did it have implications for the structure of the film, in so far that Burliuk was interested in Gauguin and wanted to emulate Gauguin, it also had implications for the entire series. Gauguin was a precursor of the Russian Avant-garde and strongly influenced this unique artistic event in the history of world art. In this sense the episode devoted to Gauguin did not simply draw together strands of the Burliuk film but also drew the strands of the entire series together, connecting the sometimes disparate and amorphous phenomena which is known as the Russian Avant-garde. The Russian avant-garde incorporates movements from  neo-primitivism, rayonism,constructivism and lasted roughly through a period from the 1880s until the early 1930s. This section of the film about Burliuk, gave the series a prisim though which all the various themes of the series could be viewed even if the structure is somewhat imposed on the material. Self evidently any structure which is applied to the history of the Russian avant-garde is not a true reflection of its development but merely a method of organising material into a coherent and accessible form for digestion by the public or viewer. The most important thing while preparing such a film is to be aware of this framework as something which is imposed and try not allow it to dominate an understanding of the material. In this way the viewer can reach their own conclusions or can be stimulated to discover the subject further for themselves. An example of the problems which arise for instance is associated  with the whole project of presenting  artists as if they were individuals working in isolation of the world around them. I will try to explain this in more detail.

In the west we privilege the individual over and above the collective and this is a result of our liberal humanist tradition derived form Christian-Judaeo concepts of the individuals place and role in the world. The development and progress of western culture is presented  as a parade of past individual geniuses who serve as pillars or supports upon which society rests and in the present a further group of lone  geniuses which will propel it into the future. For many Russian avant-garde artists and writers this obsession (or what they considered an obsession) with individual genius was in their eyes an obstacle to artistic progress and a false assessment of the contribution by artists to the overall development of society. As Alexander Rodchenko commented in the 1920s that in the modern era, in the age of the machine and industrialisation …”there will never be a unique airplane or car” ..therefore  …”we need artist workers, not geniuses”. This belief was further underlined by Osip Brik, the futurist thinker who announced in a clear attack on the notion of authorship and its connotations of genius, that if Pushkin had not written Eugene Onegin somebody else would have sooner or later. This brings me back to the documentary arts series: The Russian Avant-garde – Revolution or Renaissance. Nearly all the films where about individuals “Rodchenko and The Russian Avant-garde”, “Meyerhold, Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde”, “Kandinsky and the Russian House”, “Mayakovsky” and of course “David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde”. Only one film in the series “Architecture and the Russian Avant-garde” has a more general thematic structure, however even in this film I concentrated on three main figures – Malevich, Tatlin and Constantine Melnikov. It was very difficult to wriggle out of such a thematic straight jacket but nonetheless in each film a concerted attempt was made to relate the individual accomplishments of each artist to the wider concerns of the period and not portray them as lone geniuses working in isolation of each other but part of an artistic movement which had deep roots  in the social and political events of the early part of the 20th century. Artists like Gauguin, Kandinsky, Burliuk and Rodchenko were grappling with some of the same artistic problems of their age, albeit exploring different solutions depending on the context in which they found themselves.  The film  “David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde”, with its reference to Gauguin’s influence on the work of the Russian avant-garde artists of the era, presented an opportunity to draw together many of the threads which constituted this artistic epoch without forcing a preordained framework on the series. Instead the viewer could make up their own mind as to how the phenomena of the Russian avant-garde developed and influenced art in Russia before and after the revolution.

Mayakovsky

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

Kandinsky and the Russian House

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.