A Converstion and Screening with Filmmaker Oleg Mavromatti

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Join us for this conversation and film screening with filmmaker Oleg Mavromatti, moderated by Jordan Center Visiting Scholar Darja Filippova.

Oleg Mavromatti is an artist and filmmaker, active since 1989. In 1995 Mavromatti founded the independent film union SUPERNOVA, a fortress of Moscow’s radical cinema. Some films produced within the movement like “The Green Elephant” (1999) and “Bastards” (2000) became cult movies at that time, and a decade later they inspired the appearance of internet communities that create and share fan memes based on these films daily. Mavromatti’s unique filmmaking and directing style called “directed improvisation,” aiming at extreme realism, is also a continuation of his work as a radical performance artist. He was a member of legendary 1990s Moscow performance art groups such as “Expropriation of the Territory of Art” and NECEZIUDIK. Mavromatti’s films have been shown at festivals such as Rotterdam International Film Festival; ArtDocFest; Jihlava International Film Festival; Moscow International Film Festival; DocLisboa; QueerLisboa; Munich International Film Festival; New Horizons, Wroclaw, Poland; Syracuse International Film Festival, Go East International Film Festival, Sofia International Film Fest etc.

In 2014, Mavromatti and his partner Boryana Rossa started a new trajectory in their filmmaking, which they call post-cinema. Post-cinema incorporates found footage exclusively produced through online social networking and video blogging. The first film in this direction, “No Place for Fools,” 2014, is entirely made of YouTube videos, and received The Best Documentary award at the film festival Dvizenie, Omsk, 2015. Another film inspired by Internet vlogging, “Monkey Ostrich and Grave” 2017, won the jury award at the prestigious ArtDocFest, Moscow.

Mavromatti left Russia in 2000 and since then has lived in Bulgaria and New York, where he continues making films and art. In Bulgaria, together with artist and filmmaker Boryana Rossa, he established the international art collective ULTRAFUTURO, which focuses on technology's social, political, and ethical impacts on contemporary society. Works by the group have been shown at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Akademie der Kunste, Berlin; Exit Art, New York; Feldman Gallery, NY; GARAGE Museum, Moscow; Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art; Sofia Art Gallery and at art biennials such as Biennial for Electronic Art, Perth (BEAP); 5th Thessaloniki Biennial; 8th Varna Biennial; 1st Moscow Biennial; 2018 Beijing Biennial of Media Arts etc.

The film Semiconductor will be screened at this event.

2018

Film by Oleg Mavromatti

USA, Belarus, Russia, Bulgaria 1:17:01 h

SYNOPSIS
If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece which represents a baby in arms of a horserider, a piece which is covered over and over with decoration. “Ornament and Crime,” Adolf Loos, 1908

Anna Cadet, a video blogger and hobbyist, madly obsessed with railways and locomotives, unexpectedly meets a strange character — the wizard Kulebyakin– while recording her new vlog entry. At first, he seems to be a harmless eccentric, just like her: a steam locomotive lover. Anna sees no threat in his offer to join him witnessing a mysterious phenomenon at an abandoned factory. On the contrary, the romantic Anna is ready for an exciting adventure that can help her get more subscribers on her YouTube channel.

But everything turns into an unexpected nightmare blurring the border between reality and schizophrenic delusions.

Is there Kulebyakin and is he really a wizard? After all, even Anna’s best girlfriend is convinced of the opposite. Maybe this wizard is just a bizarre illusory projection of her mind, overloaded with information? Is he a real human being, or just a cinematic cliché, an animated quotation from someone else’s story, a concentration of fears suddenly awakened under the comfortable packaging of her seemingly innocent hobbyism? What is reality and can it be documented? And what means a sign, which had become an ornament that has lost its meaning; something that we pass by indifferently every day without noticing its hidden urge to crime … And finally – what does the sign on Anna’s hand mean? 

Director and script writer: Oleg Mavromatti
Cast: Anna Den, Viktor Vin4 Lebedev
Camera: Anna Den, Viktor Vin4 Lebedev
Editing: Oleg Mavromatti and Boryana Rossa
Producers Boryana Rossa (SUPERNOVA) and Andrey Silvestrov (League of Experimental Cinema)
English translation: Boryana Rossa

Director’s statement
For more than a decade since the appearance of YouTube, we have had an endless source of free moving image content, not even closely comparable to archival film and video materials previously available both on the Internet and in specialized repositories. Now filmmakers have endless material available for films with hyper-realistic scripts!

What, in this case, distinguishes professional selection from the amateur “novel” taking place within the network? First of all, the ability of the professional to assess the quality of the material, to identify an array of visual and semantic data that is potentially suitable for remounting, and to build a narrative from an endless daily stream of video data. 

The term "post-cinema" is derived from the term "post-internet" and refers to the creation of a movie based on content found on YouTube and similar platforms.  The bottom line is simple: post-cinema is the only completely honest cinema, as it tries, following the example of its characters-vloggers, to avoid the creation of the common perfect visuals curated by the Internet Normies.

Darja (Dasha) Filippova is scholar and an artist. Dasha’s multi-disciplinary practice is animated by the question, What is left of the Left?  Her academic work is situated at the intersection of the study of global post-socialisms and performance studies. With a focus on Russia and China, her PhD dissertation, titled ‘Indigestible Bodies: Towards a Theory of Post-Socialist Performance’ (2024), examined radical embodied artistic production made during the transition from state socialism to post-Cold War neoliberal capitalism and proposed an aesthetics of ‘indigestibility’ as a mode of critique of consumer capitalism emerging from post-socialist contexts. As a Visiting Scholar at NYU, Dasha is interested in continuing her theoretical work and research on global post-socialist performance and is embarking on a translation project of radical leftist and anarchist writings by the Moscow Actionists of the 1990s.