The whole life of Balabanov fit in the port of St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg. More precisely, “purely Peter.” Industrial zone and huge letters that made up the familiar surname – Balabanov. A living person has become a myth, a phantom. Nine years have passed since he left. For those who knew Alexei, this is hard to accept. The industrial landscape of the outskirts, which Balabanov loved so much, what he spoke about in his films, is getting closer. Someone sees in his works – a harbinger of universal evil.

You go up to the exhibition as if on a podium directed upwards, you pass by a bicycle attached to the wall. Arriving in Leningrad, Balabanov drove this around the city. The voices of his sons, Fedor and Peter, are heard in the headphones, who will accompany us, talking about their father and his films. Alexei’s sons and wife, costume designer Nadezhda Vasilyeva, who worked on his paintings, took part in the creation of this exhibition, conceived by curator Tatyana Getman and production designer Agnia Sterligova. Hence the personal intonation and old-fashioned artifacts – childhood photographs of Alexei, photographs of his parents, student and army photographs, letters, diaries. All this is from the family archive, warm, tangible.

The exhibition space is divided into zones corresponding to 17 films that Balabanov made, and which remained fantasies, unrealized ideas. Now the failed paintings are located above the old desk. They complete the exposition, long in the life of the director. The “Unmade Films” section opens with “Pan” based on the novel of the same name by Knut Hamsun and the short story “Glan’s Death”. Balabanov wrote the script in the early 90s together with Sergei Selyanov. And the film remained on paper, since the rights to the screen version were sold by the writer’s heirs to Guy Maddin, who directed Twilight of the Ice Nymphs in 1997. Balabanov’s sketches based on Vladimir Nabokov’s Camera Obscura have been preserved. Their ideas were partially transferred to his script “My brother died” and “Cargo 200”.

Balabanov could film “Roadside Picnic” by the Strugatsky brothers. The fact that Tarkovsky did this before him did not bother him. Alexey considered “Stalker” a work far from the original source. The zone in his version would be by no means spiritual, but concrete and rigid. The presence of a film adaptation of “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” also did not become an obstacle in order to approach the prose of Alexei Tolstoy himself. Balabanov’s passion for explosions showed up here. He has been fond of pyrotechnics since childhood.

Among the unrealized projects is “Young Stalin”. In 2012, Alexey read the monograph of the same name by the British historian Simon Montefiore and got excited about the idea of ​​filming, wrote the script. The slogan of the future film: “Joseph Stalin. Banker hunter. Balabanov invited Emir Kusturica as a co-author, but he refused, because the main character did not evoke any feelings in him, and where without them.

Another failed and last project is “My brother is dead”, presented at the exhibition by a sketch by Pyotr Balabanov in 2019. Aleksey Balabanov worked on the script in 2013 in Sestroretsk, managed to finish it. The plot unfolds in the afterlife. The main character Vanya is endowed with autobiographical features of the director. He loves the writer Leskov, as he loved Balabanov. Vanya’s torso has died, but it continues to live in the head of his younger and blind brother Petya as a kind of inner voice. Vanya also has a second pair of eyes with which he sees his brother. In this plan, two cornerstone Balabanov themes are read – brotherhood and ugliness. When the older brother’s eyes are closed forever, the younger one will begin to see.

But back to the beginning. Putting on headphones, the visitor feels like Danila Bagrov in “Brother”. He did not part with the player. Sergei Bodrov is given special attention at the exhibition. Before us is his entire life path – from birth, childhood to death in the Karmadon Gorge. As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a garbage truck driver, driving an orange car. As a result, he graduated from a Moscow school with an in-depth study of the French language, became an art critic, and then a director. At some point of the journey, we reach the Karmadon sign, where his heart was left in the mountains, where almost all members of the Svyaznoy film crew went to another world. We pass through a gloomy corridor, taking off the headphones, according to the instructions of the exhibition organizers. Otherwise, pain begins in the ears, strange vibration sounds. You take off your headphones and hear the sounds of rockfall in the mountains. Aleksey Balabanov could not recover from this tragedy until the end of his days, he blamed himself for advising Sergei Bodrov to go there.

We also see Alyosha Balabanov very small in black and white photographs. Here he is with his parents, here is a watermelon, sitting on a bicycle. This is the 60s. Then he studied at the Faculty of Translation in the Gorky foreign language, served in the army, represented by pages from the diary of 1981, a description of a trip to Yemen, where Alexei flew as a flight translator. We hear his voice, he tells how he accompanied tanks and weapons. In the early 80s, Balabanov visited Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Syria, Equatorial Guinea. His wife Nadezhda Vasilyeva recalls: “When I asked him about the army, he said: “These were my most unpleasant years, so I won’t tell you anything.”

The biographical space of the exhibition also presents Alexei’s memories of England. It was a completely different trip – not like in Yemen. He was on an internship at the University of Manchester. According to a classmate, Balabanov wore tight leather pants, walked barefoot with a canvas bag at the ready, his hair was long – he was infected with the spirit of hippies in the British kingdom. The authors of the exhibition made a virtual reconstruction of Balabanov’s Sverdlovsk apartment – the first personal in his life, and not virtually, but materially recreated his housing of those years, furnished with scanty Soviet furniture.

The voices of viewers who have watched Balabanov’s films in different years are heard in the headphones. They share their experiences. Along the way, we pass road signs with the names of settlements – “Karmadon”, “Brother”, a white room with an old TV, where flies buzz, a rug with bears hangs, above which two red shoes stick out of the wall – this is “Cargo 200″. The journey is accompanied not only by road signs indicating films, but also by a kind of titles. For example, this one: “The city is an evil force. The strong one comes and becomes weak. The city is taking over. That’s where you disappeared.” Nearby is a model made for Morphine, a room with a bed where the hero of The Stoker lived. Much has been recreated especially for the exhibition – props, furniture, a red couch made of Tata’s Kopna yarn from the film It Doesn’t Hurt Me. A copy of the yellow tram from “Brother” was made, in which you can go and lie down. Nearby is a crypt that actually exists on Vasilyevsky Island, in the cemetery where Balabanov filmed. The stop of “Blind Man’s Buff” is reminiscent of the laugh room, the sinister world of comics, the main character of which is Nikita Mikhalkov in a raspberry jacket. Under Glass is a 1908 lifetime edition of the writer and Polish revolutionary Vaclav Seroshevsky. The unfinished project “River”, filmed by Balabanov in 2002, is associated with it. Elements of Yakut costumes for the film, the production of which was interrupted by a car accident and the tragic death of the Yakut actress Tuyara Svinoboeva, are exhibited. Another eternal pain Balabanov.

Tatyana Geman, curator of the exhibition, says that the exhibition appeared on the territory of Sevkabel Port, because Alexei Balabanov lived nearby, on Vasilyevsky Island, liked to shoot there and was buried at the Smolensk cemetery. This is his environment – a panorama of water with a modern “Sea” sign, pipes, old industrial buildings that have been given an aesthetically perfect look, although there is an untouched industrial zone across the road. You look out through a muddy window, and there is a gray factory territory, a cathedral covered with a fabric of restorers. There is a feeling of something infernal.

For the art director of the exhibition Agnia Sterligova, what we finally see is the image of the country about which Alexey Balabanov made his films. Yanoe and hidden here nearby. In the secret room, where you can enter those who are 18 years old, there is nothing terrible and dangerous. Just the interior of a room from the film “About Freaks and People” with “indecent” pictures, perfume bottles, sketches by Nadezhda Vasilyeva for the film. And next to the secret room is a boat with white lilies, on which the hero of Sergei Makovetsky sailed in the film. She, as if from timelessness, non-existence, connects this and that light, life and death.