On March 23 at 9 pm in Cinema House’s Blue Hall the Andrei Zagdansky retrospective starts. He is a member of DOCU/SHORT jury at 11th Docudays UA. Today the film Two and The Interpretation of Dreams are to be screened. The retrospective will continue on March 26 with the film Konstantin and Mouse. The final screening (Orange Winter) is scheduled for March 27. After each showing there will be a Q&A with the director.

The work of Andrei Zagdansky can be roughly divided along two distinct poles: the freedom of the individual and the unfreedom of societies. In his debut film The Interpretation of Dreams (1990), Zagdansky conducted a kind of psychoanalytic session on his native land’s history. And in Orange Winter (2007) he presented a panorama of the carnival that prevailed on the Maidan in 2004. These two films somehow show the viewer scenes of mass consciousness in which the unfreedom of society suppresses the individual.

His other films allow the viewer to experience the laughing gas of personal freedom. The images of the expat artist Vasily Sitnikov in Vasya (2002) and the avant-garde poet Konstantіn Kuzmіnsky in Konstantin and Mouse (2006) blur the boundaries between audacity and the instinct for self-preservation. In this same system of moral coordinates, the message of his new film Vahrych and the Black Square, which he is currently working on, promises to hit the mark.

Who planted the seed which your love of cinema grew from?

You know, I didn’t have a choice, because my father was a cinematographer. Since I was a child, I’ve had a certain connection to this matter. I loved coming to the studio, and the virus probably infected me when I was a child. Although my father did everything imaginable for me not to join the theatrical institute. He really wanted me to have a real profession. So after school, under pressure from my parents. I joined the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. But very soon I realized that I couldn’t study there. So a year later, I joined the theatrical institute.

Why did you take up documentary filmmaking?

Perhaps if I was making fiction films, you would ask me, ‘Why do you make fiction films?’ Actually there isn’t much difference between a fiction and a documentary film. Documentaries give me the opportunity to speak and to project what I feel. When an idea comes to my mind, it’s usually expressed in the form of a documentary film. What I’m doing is somewhere on the border between documentary and staged films. As Godard said, when you shoot a fiction film it becomes a documentary, and vice versa, when you are shooting a documentary picture, it’s a fiction film. Cinema has varying degrees of control. In fiction films it’s greater, and in documentaries it’s less. In this regard, The Five Obstructions by Lars von Trier is absolutely gorgeous. It’s a kind of manifesto of controlled and uncontrolled filmmaking. I found my own rules for this kind of cinema.

‘Perestroika’, the collapse of the Soviet Union, moving to the US... there have been many events in your life which weren’t conducive to creative activity. What did you do during your prolonged creative pauses?

I strongly disagree with the idea that there are moments that aren’t conducive to creativity. Certain works of art arise not because of something, but in spite of something. There are varying degrees of difficulty, but there’s no such thing as things which hinder you. People have written books in the most horrific circumstances, which we cannot even imagine.

My longest break from work was when I was doing things in the US that were very remotely connected to filmmaking. That was a pretty painful period. Then I was in New York and I had to start life over again. However, it gave me the opportunity to form a new view of the world. New York is still a very stimulating city. I only started filming the movie Vasya in 2000, and I only finished it in 2002. After that, I was quite happy, because the energy that had been accumulating in me broke free.

Vasya focused on the artist Vasily Sitnikov. Then came the movie Kostya and Mouse about the avant-garde poet Konstantin Kuzminsky. In 2010 you made My Father Evgeni, dedicated to your own father. And now you’re working on a film about Vahrych Bakhchanian. Tell me, on what basis do you choose the individuals who you write your ‘cine-portraits’ about?

If there’s any kind of logic in it, it isn’t known to me. Each film appears by itself because of some of its circumstances. Some things are just dumped on you. The desire arises in me to share their experiences and thoughts with someone. I don’t make all these films according to a single principle. 

You made the film Orange Winter, which builds up a parallel between the events in Kyiv in 2004 and the opera Boris Godunov. Do you think you could draw any parallels with the Euromaidan?

Orange Winter actually featured two operas. In that situation I was interested in a parallel reality. It explained some things and not others. When I was shooting this film, I eventually came to see the events of 2014 as a carnival victory over a harsh winter and the forces of evil. The recent situation has nothing to do with it. Currently we have a tragedy, and any parallels in this case are simply irrelevant.

What are the latest trends in documentary film?

Technically more and more opportunities are constantly opening up. People are making completely personal films without having any cinematic training. There are some wonderful films that combine fiction and non-fiction techniques. I love documentaries because there are many possibilities to experiment, and to join different things and aesthetics together.

Does your creativity have any taboos?

In his outstanding book Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel wrote that there are two taboos in film: real sex and real death. Film is constantly approaching the simulation of both one and the other, but it doesn’t move beyond the bounds of the permitted. For example, the film by Michael Winterbottom, 9 Songs, shows real sex; it was a very boring film to watch. Yesterday I saw footage on TV of people dying. I have repeatedly used footage of dead people in my films. However, it’s important to use tact, and not to turn it into voyeurism.

In 2006, Eric Steele made the film Bridge. The picture was shot in San Francisco, where there is that infamous bridge from which suicides quite often jump. The director had his cameramen and cameras, which were equipped with zoom lenses, a long way from the bridge. They watched and filmed the people jumping off the bridge. And they managed to shoot quite a lot of people. In addition to these shots, the film has a few interviews with the relatives and friends of the victims. But when I watched this film, I hated what he had done. After all, this is voyeurism – the viewer sees something which he basically shouldn’t have seen. This is a kind of pornography of death – very similar to exploitation movies. 

Interview by Anton Filatov