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part of
double bill #27
The Hymns of Muscovy
Гимны Московии
Int’l Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen
FIPRESCI Prize
Int’l Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen
e-flux Prize
Melbourne Film Festival
Best Experimental Short Film
The Hymns of Muscovy is a trip to the eponymous planet, which is an upside-down space twin of the city of Moscow. As the title suggests, the journey also takes us back in time. Gliding along the surface of the planet, we look down at the sky and see historic architectural styles fly by—the exuberant Socialist Classicism, aka the Stalinist Empire, the laconic and brutalist Soviet Modernism, and the hodgepodge of their contemporary knock-offs and revivals.
An essential companion to this journey through time and space is Alexander Manotskov’s hymnic variations on the Soviet anthem. Written in 1943, the anthem has undergone three editions of its lyrics, yet remains musically unchanged and now serves as the official anthem of the Russian Federation. Manotskov used an early recording of the anthem as source material to create three electronic variations, each corresponding to an architectural style. As if, in a twist of Goethe’s phrase, architecture plays its frozen music. Look closely, can you hear it?
Bio Dimitri Venkov
Filmmaker Dimitri Veknov’s debut film Mad Mimes (2012) earned him international recognition. His subsequent work, Krisis (2014), was selected for the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and featured in Documenta 14. In 2018, Venkov’s The Hymns of Muscovy received multiple accolades at international film festivals and found its place in prominent institutional and private art collections. He has participated in biennials in Moscow, Bergen, Göteborg, Wroclaw, Athens, and others. His works have been showcased at esteemed galleries such as Whitechapel and Hayward, and he has held personal exhibitions at MHKA, Nassauischer Kunstverein, CCA Winzavod, and Manezh Moscow.
My family and I emigrated from Russia in 1992. Whenever I returned, I felt a strange, familiar sensation, no matter how many years had passed or how much had changed. I especially noticed it when looking at the clouds; they looked like home. Yet my home now is Western Europe. As a kid, I grew up in a German suburb, surrounded by fields of crops, misty beneath a grey sky. Both Cyclepaths by Anton Cla and The Hymns of Muscovy by Dimitri Venkov feel strangely familiar to me. In their own ways, but with a similar uncanny atmosphere, both films seem to foretell the collapse of their worlds. They share a sense of unrest; streets and fields on the edge of abstraction and disintegration; spaces of tension and reflection, filled with poles, wires, and light. Both use air and sky as emotional ground; symbols of freedom, distance, and observation. There’s an atmosphere of floating, of being suspended between nostalgia and anxiety. Together, they form a dialogue between two geographies and two states of being: intimate and detached. Screening them side by side creates a continuum, a shared mood of eeriness where space, sound, and memory echo one another.
Credits
Script
Camera
Pavel Filkov
Editor
Music
Alexander Manotskov
With support of
WINZAVOD Contemporary Art Center