Ilya Khrzhanovsky's DAU is the most original and ambitious cinematic project of the twenty-first century—not only in Russian cinema. Consisting of fourteen films and mini-series, DAU presents a prolonged anthropological experiment during which participants spent more than a year (2008–9) living in a specially designed Kharkiv “Institute” of Physics and Technologies. Filmed continuously by Jürgen Jürgens, they played the staff and scientists of a 1950–60s secret Soviet research institution led by legendary physicist Lev Landau. Landau is played by conductor Teodor Currentzis; theater god Anatolii Vasiliev is his teacher Krupitsa (Petr Kapitsa), and Ukrainian actress Radmila Shchegoleva appears as Dau's wife Kora (Nora in the film), whose memoirs inspired the film. But the majority of the characters are not professional actors, but stars of the arts and sciences. The KGB boss is played by actual former officer Vladimir Azhippo, and the leader of the thugs destroying the Institute in Degeneration and New Man is the notorious Neo-Nazi Maksim Martsinkevich (Tesak), who recently died in prison from “suicide” (with apparent signs of torture).
Khrzhanovsky has been criticized for traumatizing his actors, objectivizing women, orientalizing the Soviet experience, aestheticizing fascism, and creating a facsimile of totalitarianism on the set besides. Sophie Pinkham summarizes these critiques well in “Nihilism for Oligarchs” in New Left Review, yet I don't agree with her final reading of the project as the epitome of the new elite's cynicism. DAU is a monumental artistic experiment, and telecom oligarch Sergei Adoniev deserves respect for funding experimental film rather than buying yachts or football teams.
The experiment fails because the makers of DAU invest too much in reality and authenticity. Violence—psychological or physical—is the main evidence of that authenticity. By putting their actors-personages next to actually dangerous people they hoped to reproduce “the epoch.” But the results are more limited. There are two types of films currently available on the DAU site. The films in the first group (The String Theory, Nikita Tanya, Valera Sasha, The Empire, Nora Mother, Three Days) predominantly depict conversations between two to three characters, who then do or do not have sex. These episodes are meant to let us into the heroes’ inner worlds, revealing the interplay between their everyday and the zeitgeist. With no scripts, the actors improvised their dialogues—and with a few notable exceptions, failed miserably.
The second group of DAU films repeats a formula consisting of three major elements in any given order: a lengthy and chaotic conversation at the table / in bed / on the street (see above), a sex scene, and brutal violence inflicted by KGB officers and their cronies. Among the best in this group is the film Brave People, which challenges the relentless and lifeless dichotomy of private life (good) and state control (bad). The tortured but passionate relationship between the Jewish physicist and his wife parallel rather than contrast the humiliation and violence he experiences in the office of the KGB. But Brave People is an aberration among hours and hours of repetitive cliché. The filmmakers’ invasion into “life” is simply neither energetic nor inventive enough to become “art”—to heat the real into the metaphors and symbols of history. The one exception is the representation of sex: arguably for the first time in Russian cinema, sex scenes are neither pornographic nor repulsive, but convey more about the characters and their epoch than the incoherent dialogue and clumsy acting.
The representation of sexuality is one of few links between DAU and twenty-first-century aesthetics. Sadly, it is more interesting to talk about these films than to watch them: for me, this is proof of the experiment's failure. With evident determination to create Gesamtkunstwerk, in which art and reality will be connected through actual violence and ensuing trauma, Khrzhanovsky's films pay homage to the age of modernism, rather than open new doors or test new ideas. To revise my opening statement, DAU is the most original and most ambitious cinematic project of the twentieth century.
