ELEPHANT THE GREEN, December
1999

December 29

Directed by Svetlana Baskova
Starring: Sergei Pokhomov, Alexander Maslaev, Vladimir Yepifantsev, Anatoly Osmolovsky
Produced by Oleg Mavromatti

Blood, blood, blood. Just like medieval artists who used to worship the ideals of humanism, chose a human being as their emblem, or our compatriots of the beginning of the century accepted geometry as their religion, now our Russian situationists shield their art with blood.

And while the representatives of the more conservative Western mentality interpret art as the highest point of skill, Russian situationists are in a hurry to cry out, spit out their bloody piece into an impetuous stream of everchanging reality. And while shooting their "dirty" cinema Danish representatives of a new cine-wave still devote themselves to aesthetic search, Russian situationists dive into brutality of a spontaneous cine-process. They fill in the absence of stylistic nicety with overwhelming energy kneaded on live vital texture, on non-articulated still clearly readable sociality, trying to find a tuning-fork of nowadays actual art in total integrity...

The Elephant Green is a second film by Svetlana Baskova, a professional artist who took a video camera in her hands in pursuit of adequacy, and invited her friends artists to participate in this hardly definable action in the spirit of Arto, in this bloody nightmare, as we call our everyday reality, when there vanish the borders between a frightful night-dream and TV news from the battle-field.

Apparently, this very thing stipulates that soldiers have been made the main characters, and it increases actuality. Too pitiful in the beginning of the film, sitting in a detention cell, when, like in Kafka’s reality, it’s hard to understand where the hostage and the invader is, they become, in the name of justice, bloody monsters in the end. The composition of the film reminds of an anatomic model of society if you imagine that it exists as Domian Hirst's dissected cow, where, despite the hierarchy of inner organs, everything is inseparable.

Applying methods of the art world to the machinery of the shooting process it is possible to say that the picture is filmed as a performance passing in time, a sort of transaction where a strictly determined script-line refracts through reaction of the main characters, concrete personalities.

Inner laws of situationism are antipsychological, they are not as much hostile as just indifferent to it. The emblem (tattooing) as the sign of time is more important than its inner mechanism. However strange it may seem, an extreme frankness of linguistic constructions being driven to absurdity, produces quite different images of the "upper" level. Plunging the main heroes into a bloody mixture, the director is trying to find the borders of horror but her efforts are futile. It seems that nowadays in order to get rid of a spiritual ghetto, it is necessary to get to the bottom of day-to-day routine’s mire, with all unattractiveness of the last revelation of the Three Horsemen. And then, pushing off from there, to rush upward for a salutary gulp of freedom, where there exist one’s own dignity and inviolability of the inner world.

video: 128 Kbps. fragment

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