CLOWNERY won the Best Medium-Length award, plus an honourable mention Best Editing, in our LCF’s 2nd Edition.
Interview with director Dmitri Frolov.
(Dmitri Frolov wanted to start with these kind words.)
First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to the Festival and the jury for their attention to our film and their flattering assessment! It is very important for the authors, creators, and the entire film crew to recognize and have others look at what you wanted to do and did, sharing your vision and attitude to the reality around you. Mutual understanding with the viewer is desirable and very necessary for those who make a film.
How did you come to direct this film? And tell us about the process of going from Daniil Kharms’ texts to your own scenario.
It is necessary to understand the context of the time when the idea came. In the late 80s, archives began to open in the USSR, revealing the horror that took place in the country in the 1930s. Stalin's repressions, the destruction of hundreds of thousands of people on false charges, lies in the newspapers and magazines of that time. Almost all of this was unknown to us, who lived in the USSR before perestroika. Of course, we had heard about the "Cult of Personality", but we had no idea of such a large-scale, as it turned out, disaster in full. At the same time, biographies and works of long-forgotten and little-known authors of the first half of the 20th century began to be published in various magazines, books that were not published during their lifetimes appeared on sale. Almost by chance, I came across the published works of Daniil Kharms, and I was amazed by the depth and paradox of his talent. He was an almost unknown author. During his lifetime, he was published only in children's magazines, where his poems for children were occasionally printed. He lived in Leningrad before World War II and barely made ends meet, sometimes going hungry for days due to lack of money for bread. But he also wrote poetry and prose for adults, which were not published during his life. During the war, when the Nazi troops were at the gates of Leningrad, Kharms ended up in prison and died in a prison hospital during the siege from hunger in the cold winter of 1942.
It must be said that Daniil Kharms's works are not distinguished by their great length and coherence. They are rather small scenes and humorous pieces of one or two pages in a book, consisting mainly of dialogues between the characters. But they strangely convey the whole essence, fear and pain of the era in which he lived. I realized that this is what is needed to tell about the absurdity and absurdity of life in the Soviet country. I came up with a through character – a certain hero of a non-intelligentsia type, from the lower strata of society, perhaps having once served in the navy, Pyotr Ivanovich. I connected all the episodes through him. The author himself also appears in the film – the film begins and ends with him. Thus, the visual series was almost entirely invented by me, since Kharms himself did not give descriptions of the place and time in which his stories took place, and the dialogues were entirely his.
About your cast & crew: had you already worked with some of them? And how did you meet the new recruits?
In the late 80s, I worked in the youth theater studio "NEO", which was organized during "perestroika" from young actors. Almost all the actors from this theater appeared in the film. Before that, I knew and worked with only two of them: Dmitry Shibanov, who played the main role, and Mark Nakhamkin, who played Pushkin (they fought in the last scene). Separately, I should say about the character "uncle". This is the old actor Alexei Zakharov, who studied at the theater institute in the 30s, when Kharms created. During World War II, he caught a cold in the trenches, lost his voice and therefore stopped being an actor. All his life he ran a cultural center. In the film, he was voiced by another person.
When & where was CLOWNERY shot, and how much time in total did you have to shoot?
The film was shot in Leningrad (now the city is still called St. Petersburg) and its environs. Filming began in the spring of 1989, in April-May. The main part of the film was shot in the summer of the same year. In September, I sat down to edit, and on September 29, 1989, the premiere of the film took place in the large apartment of one of the actresses in the film. So everything was fast and swift. Only six months passed from the idea to the implementation!
This is not a common film to play in. What were your instructions for the actors?
The actors played the circumstances I suggested. Sometimes we improvised together with them, introducing elements from Kharms' texts. For example, this is how the scene with the tsar and tsarina was filmed. We literally improvised on Kharms's theme.
It must be said that the dialogue scenes with the text from the characters' point of view were done in an unusual way. At first, the actors acted out scenes in front of a microphone. This is how the sound was recorded. It looked like a recording of a radio play by roles. Then the image of each frame was filmed under the soundtrack at a slow speed. The camera also shot on film at a reduced speed. This is how the plasticity of the character was changed. The movements became more accelerated, nervous and jerky than in real life. This was probably not very convenient for the actors themselves, but in my opinion the effect was needed.
The scene of the sailor beating Pushkin was born from Kharms's bare dialogues. It can be read as a confrontation between an intellectual and a lumpen proletarian, or echoes of Stalin's repressions against the Jews can be found in it. The scene contains many meanings.
At the Little Croco Festival, we’re fond of anecdotes. What was the shoot’s most difficult moment? And/or, was there a magical scene or shot that everyone loved to do?
It was not very usual to film an erotic scene with a completely naked actress. This was atypical at that time. In the Soviet Union, such scenes were practically never filmed, and naked bodies were not seen in the frame. I can probably only remember Andrei Tarkovsky's “Andrei Rublev”, which has one scene. We went for a bold experiment in this regard in 1989.
Another very subtle moment was connected with the salad that the "uncle" steps on in one of the scenes of the film. Our mutual understanding with the time of Daniil Kharms also consisted in the fact that in the year when the film was shot, due to food shortages in the country, rationing of various consumer goods was introduced, including soap, tobacco, alcohol and various food products: sausages, pasta, meat and dairy products. All of this was strictly limited. Therefore, it was difficult to set the table for filming the feast scenes. Stepping on a plate with a salad made from products purchased with rationing was extremely blasphemous for everyone. Nevertheless, we filmed this scene, as you can see.
The scene of Kharms' dream, when he walks inside the water and meets the dream girl running away into the sea, was probably really liked by everyone visually. It was filmed in two exposures with the sea waves superimposed over the scene with the heroes.
Your cameos are lovely, for some reason. We all kind of agree that even a viewer who doesn’t know you might guess you are the director or the author, and it somehow increases the narration’s poetry and authenticity. How do you decide whether you have a part on-screen? (And on set: do you ask someone to guide you then?)
Thank you very much for such a flattering assessment of my acting!
It turns out that I took the liberty of becoming a co-author of Kharms and appearing on screen in his image. In a way, this is true, forgive me for such a bold assumption. But it turns out that I have assembled a kind of panel from his precious mosaic.
In all my appearances, I practically looked from the screen at the viewer, as if peering into his eyes: did he correctly understand what I want to tell him?!
As an actor, I do not take part in all of my films. It is very difficult: to be everything on the set. Only then does this happen when I understand that in my head I see myself on the screen in one place or another in the film.
On the set, I usually direct myself. I just ask whoever is the cameraman at the moment to show me the boundaries of my existence in the frame at different sizes and the amplitude of my movement when I move within the frame.
You do give this “past” appearance to your films (we remember the one you sent us last year too). How was the work with your director of photography? And are there sides of the old-fashioned look that you’ll only bring later through the postproduction?
As a rule, an almost finished image is born on the set during the shooting process. I shot almost all my films on Soviet-made film from the Svema company. This is a special film that preserves all the rough edges and inclusions of its time and brings elements of its internal conflicts to the scene being shot, so to speak. The director of photography in my films is also me, so I work with myself on a subconscious level. As a rule, I know in advance, after testing the material, what kind, quality and feeling the final image will turn out to be, and I use this quality to express my ideas most adequately. In post-production, I usually work only on contrast and color. There is no need to add additional old-fashioned features there - the film material does it itself!
From the initial post-production, one can only recall that I laid the film with the scene with the tsar and tsarina, stylized as the beginning of the 20th century, on the floor and asked several people to walk on it in boots to give the film the necessary degree of wear. I also subjected the close-up of the main character confessing his love to Marya Ivanovna to mechanical changes: I scratched lightning lines on the film to give the monologue more expression.
Do talk about CLOWNERY’s postprod.
The film itself was shot on 16 mm reversible film with a Krasnogorsk-3 camera. That is, after developing, I immediately received the final image. Initially, the image and sound existed on different media and were synchronized during the process of demonstrating the film on the screen. The film existed in one single copy, and could not help but wear out during use - screenings in clubs, underground festivals and apartment concerts. Over time, I had to restore the film and restore the sound. I re-digitized the entire film and corrected the image and sound in digital form. This was completed by 2005.
You know we must ask you this: why was CLOWNERY released so much time after its completion?
At the time the film was shot, there were no technologies or opportunities to preserve it and release it for distribution. Despite the fact that "perestroika" was already beginning in the country, the Soviet Union with its laws and opportunities still existed, and it was practically impossible to get funding to reprint the film on the generally accessible 35 mm cinema format. I subsequently restored the film myself at my own expense, without attracting outside funding. Then computer technologies began to appear. That's when the opportunity to make copies on VHS and DVD appeared.
Where can people watch CLOWNERY?
Today there is no problem to find and watch the film. It can be easily found on the Internet. For example:
Any past or future projects, that you would like to share here?
I will be glad to share any of my projects here. Since I work in the genre of experimental cinema, I am interested in films where the experiment with the image is of an applied nature, revealing the essence of the author's idea as fully as possible. That is, the experiment can be not only with the image, but also with editing, sound or meaning. Experiment, so to speak, in the broadest sense of the word. Pure form-creation does not attract me, although I pay due respect to these authors.
I can offer you, for example, films on the themes of the works of other Russian poets of the past. I have a film "Above the Lake". It was shot based on the poems of Alexander Blok, who lived at the very beginning of the 20th century in the era of silent cinema. Therefore, I made a reconstruction of the cinema of his time. I shot on black and white film with a 35 mm camera with a hand drive, that is, I literally turned the handle on an old movie camera, setting its mechanism in motion. The image turned out identical to that time.
There is also a film called "Last Love". It is in color. And also, of course, experimental. The musical and poetic composition "Oh, my prophetic soul" to the verses of Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev for a reader, pianist and string orchestra by composer Sergei Alexandrovich Oskolkov served as the sound basis for a philosophical parable about the love of the human and the divine, about the cycle of life, about the decline of human civilization. Fyodor Tyutchev lived in the first half of the 19th century. In the film, I did not try to recreate his era, but I took the lyricism and depth of his poetic works as a starting point.
There are other films, of course. There are also plans for the future, but I prefer not to talk about them, so as not to release a premature animal into the world. Plans and ideas usually undergo some changes in the process of thinking, filming and even editing. Let's wait for their materialization over time.
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