Egoactivism – Weekend – Kommersant

Egoactivism – Weekend – Kommersant


Squared Freedom by Anastasia Zverkova, a laconic documentary film about people exploring the limits of human physics and the psyche for future flights to the moon and beyond, has been released in limited release. In Antarctica or Tibet, the stars are equally distant, but, as shown in the film, the inner space is able to indicate the route - to the galactic brother.

Text: Alexey Filippov

Cinema and space are an even more indestructible union than a piece of bread and a slice of cheese. It's not that literature or painting can't cope with the genre of an existential odyssey disguised as a search for new frontiers beyond Earth, but in the case of the starry sky, it's better to see once. Especially close and in motion. Whether it’s the comical Meliesian Moon with a rocket stuck in its eye, Kubrick’s time travel, the cosmic horror of Alien, a family saga in a galaxy far, far away by George Lucas and descendants, Nolan’s scientism at the junction with melodrama, or James Cameron’s environmental manifesto on the planet Pandora. All this somehow resonates in the auditorium, confirming Konstantin Bronzit's axiom: "We cannot live without space."

The 66-minute "Freedom Squared" by Anastasia Zverkova also moves in the orbit of intergalactic dreams. The axial plot of the essentially documentary almanac is about Nikolai Osetsky, a junior researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who went to the Vostok Antarctic station in 2018 to study how extreme conditions, close to those in space, affect the visual system of polar explorers. Behind the scenes, reworked entries from his diaries sound more philosophical than scientific, as well as conversations with the woman he loves, with whom the expedition separates Nikolai for almost a year. They try to speak English in order to master the international language of science, but this only widens the gap. The closer the pole, the more both are immersed in their thoughts and experiences.

Subsequent stories peck out of this, like matryoshka dolls. Doctor of Medical Sciences Evgeny Ilyin, also an employee of the Russian Academy of Sciences, talks about the expedition to Vostok in 1969, which made it possible to establish that even such conditions can be endured by a person for a year. True, psychological difficulties may arise - it was not from scratch that Stephen King invented The Shining, filmed just by the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And in 2019, another Sirius program is launched, whose goal is to check how six testers from Russia and the United States get along in the closeness of the shuttle. Work tasks, footage and isolation time - 120 days, as in a real flight to the moon. Stefania Fedyaj, who is responsible for the health of the crew, shares her observations about loneliness and reflection. And again the conversation goes farther and farther from the cosmos - into the jungle of human relations: with others and with oneself. What is it like to live nose to nose with strangers? Is it easier when you are in splendid isolation far from civilization in general?

A kind of remark to these researches of the Russian Academy of Sciences is a trip to the Tibetan monks - also, of course, with scientific intent. Meditation and overcoming mental storms, if turned into a technique for future astronauts, can simplify space travel, reduce the requirements for comfort and resources on board. Prepare not only physically, but also mentally. No matter how pathetic it may sound - also from the big screen - "The path to deep space lies through the inner space."

It seems that everything was started for the sake of this idea, and Anastasia Zverkova and her co-author Dmitry Slobodchikov constructed a layout of spiritual searches from three and a half intersecting stories. Like any abstract reflection - and the factology of the film does not concern exactly the area that comes to the fore - "Freedom Squared" is open to criticism. Practically defenseless, like a person outside of civilization, in extreme conditions. Take, for example, the ragged, fragmentary narrative, as if dictated by a lack of timing and outlined solely by the activities of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and not by the current of thought, which would turn Zverkova’s work into a relevant behind-the-scenes — or its essence — film essay. In the end, when making a documentary film about space in Russian, it is strange to ignore the legacy of Pavel Klushantsev - with his crystal clarity of thought at the junction of science pop and sci-fi, which influenced minds in two galaxies at once - Soviet and Hollywood (from "Planet of Storms" Roger Corman and Peter Bogdanovich edited two alternate histories embellished with dot footage).

Perhaps the problem is also in the fact that the north, space, Tibet are such powerful signs in themselves that they do not seem to need words. They already contain that centuries-old history of risk and search that humanity has gone through in an attempt to know the world and oneself in it. Whatever you say, you'll miss the point. So the neighborhood of cinema with dreams of stellar distances gives rise to additional meanings - in the margins, outside the research of the filmmakers. To reflect on the boundaries of freedom (whatever that means), neither the "East", nor Tibet, nor the cosmos are needed - these are still isolated cases: not everyone will be taken to the future (on the conditional Moon). Although in (post)pandemic realities, interiors and silence on the phone can be especially acute.

Just like a cinema hall - to play the role of a democratic "space shuttle", where a host of loneliness, hostages of their own thoughts and views of the world, suddenly turns out to be part of a single spectator experience. Just as the stars are a self-sufficient part of the galaxy, and a person is a grain of sand of society with a different charge of individual will (this, by the way, is the interstellar “High Society” by Claire Denis). Traveling into space, even if only on a movie screen, sets off a chain of eternal paradoxes, reminding us that a person is a social animal, but is born and dies alone. The desire for solitude is often impossible or unbearable; social dependence also entails inevitable communicative fatigue; the openness of the mind rests on its biological limitations; Finally, we understand the role of the ego in achieving new things—and at the same time, the need to overcome it in order to reach truly great heights.

At the box office from March 16


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