“Why are you calling us here again?” – Weekend – Kommersant

In limited release, there is “Alive” by Konstantin Selin, a documentary film about the creation of a large-scale installation “Missing in newsreel” in the Lenfilm pavilion dedicated to World War II, and its author, Dmitry Poshtarenko, a search engine. “Alive” was filmed by Alexander Sokurov’s “Example of Intonation” Foundation, which acted as the artistic director of the film, last year the film won many prizes at Russian festivals, and was also awarded the Lavr Prize and the Dziga Vertov Prize as the best documentary of the year. Konstantin Selin spoke about the obsession with the past, about the pit on the Nevsky Piglet and the sculptures that came to life Konstantin Shavlovsky.

How did you meet your hero?

I sometimes collaborate with various publications, once I got the task to shoot a story about a military-patriotic exposition in the Leningrad region. To be honest, I don’t really like visiting such places, I’m not at all close to all this militaristic themes, which in our country very strongly smacks of political conjuncture. When I arrived there with a camera, I saw exactly what I expected: trenches, trenches, and even life-size sculptures of the military. It looked creepy. And I also had to remove something human. And then I saw a guy who somehow strangely looked at these dolls, straightened their hats, looked into their eyes – there was something special about that. It turned out that he is the author of the entire exhibition. We are almost the same age as him, he is 1990, and I am 1989, and then I still thought: young guy, why does he need all this? Since then we have become friends. I immediately felt that between him and what he was doing, there was some kind of tension, some kind of mystery that changed my mind. And I began to take it off from time to time. I came to him when he was building a large panorama “The Road Through the War” on the “Sevkabel”, visually it was all very interesting, how they collect these dolls in parts there. I took pictures but didn’t know what to do with it. And all the time Dima said this: you know, I would like to make a movie with you, but I just don’t know yet about what.

At what point did you realize what kind of film you were making?

When he took me with him to excavations on the Nevsky Piglet. Before that, I had never seen how search engines work. We arrived, and a trench had already been dug there and we had already found “so many whole, so many in parts.” This means that they found the remains of German and Soviet soldiers – the bones are all mixed in this red clay. And I ended up in this hole. I stand there with a camera, take pictures of Dima and other guys and think: what is going on? Where I am? Then I filmed how they found the locket – these shots are at the very beginning of the film – and these nameless bones suddenly had a name behind which someone’s fate grew. And I realized that I can and should convey on the screen not the patriotic frenzy that fills state holidays and military museums, but this feeling when you see how the story of a missing person grows out of the ground, caught in a funnel of a huge catastrophe. To show how this man was abandoned by his contemporaries, how no one really needs him even now, except for a handful of enthusiasts standing with me in this pit. And how do these guys, my peers, bring him back to life, in his image and likeness, making a sculpture out of him for the exhibition, with good intentions completely, and what do they turn into? What is this action, what religion does it belong to? How to take it? And what can I do for those who would be left lying forgotten in this damp earth? It was when I had these questions that I felt in which direction to move.

The film was completed before February 24, 2022. Is there anything you would like to change about it now?

I had such a desire. I edited the film, deliberately not focusing on certain episodes, I wanted to give the viewer the opportunity to see and feel the complexity and inconsistency of what he sees on the screen. But after February 24, I really wanted to say some things much tougher. And I even tried to do something in editing, but as soon as I touched it with new knowledge about the future, then everything that was put together was destroyed. We no longer thought about those lying there, in that pit, because there are already many lying here. And in the end I realized that I would not change anything. That the film took shape at that time and the way it took shape. It was important for me that the viewer could, together with me, look into the eyes of these sculptures and see in them the question that I saw. For me, the most amazing thing about creating these panoramas was the moment when the artist puts the last highlight on the eyes of the dolls. In their eyes, I read the question: “For what and why are you calling us here again?” The answer to this question must be sought outside the frame – and we already know it. Unfortunately.

The shot when the artist puts the last highlight on the eyes is one of the most memorable in the film – because at some point we begin to see the world through the eyes of a revived doll. And this is actually a very scary shot.

Yes, I wanted the audience to see how they come to life and how the memory of the war comes alive with them. I wanted to show that by reviving the past, we are responsible for it.

I worked at Lenfilm and saw how the Lost in Newsreel exposition was being prepared, and for this reason I also expected to see documentary horror on the screen. And I saw carefully and lovingly shot a film-portrait.

It doesn’t seem to me that this is a portrait film, but I certainly treat Dima and what he does with great attention and respect. There are people who went missing many years ago, there is Dima, who finds them, and there is the politics of memory, what happens in society with the memory of the war. These are all the layers of the film that I have worked with. And I didn’t want to shoot horror at all, although I understand how it could be shot on this material.

If you think of Alive as a testament to Russia in 2021, what do you think your film is testifying to?

About how we lived before February 24, 2022, how we worked with memory, how we chose this form of representation, how we interpreted the events of the past. But besides that, the film has what it started with – there is this pit and the bones thrown in it. This pit, as well as the words of Viktor Petrovich Astafyev that May 9 is not at all a joyful holiday, but a day of commemoration of the dead and a day of repentance, which never happened. That’s what excited me as a director and as a person.

But between the search and reburial of the bones of the soldiers who died on the Nevsky Piglet, and the patriotic exposition with heroic sculptures, it seems, there is a rather large distance. In one case, we let go of the past, and in the other, we invite it to visit the present. Is there any contradiction in these actions?

I think this question is better to ask the authors of the exposition. For them, this is an important issue.

Did you ask them?

Of course, and this is a conflict between the living and the dead, between the past and the present, and it seems to me that it is reflected in the film. But I do not pronounce it directly, because the reality is more complicated than my interpretations as well. Before the film was lucky enough to receive support from the Intonation Example Foundation, I had conversations with European producers who wanted to bring the political component to the forefront: who finances this panorama, whose money is behind it, how the political situation is created in Russia. I didn’t want to make such a film. Therefore, Alexander Nikolaevich Sokurov helped me a lot, talking with him about the future film. He touched on the theme of the Second World War more than once in his work, he thinks and knows a lot about it, and he supported me in going my own way and looking deeper.

And don’t you worry that, depending on the internal attitudes of the viewer, your films can be perceived in a fairly wide range: from “never again” to “we can do it again”?

Yes, unfortunately it is. Perhaps I did not defend my film strongly with a direct author’s statement, so that it was immediately clear where is white and where is black. But it seems to me that this can also be its advantage, because the bright feeling that I laid at the base of the film may be the medicine that people really need now. After all, we are now deeply ill.

Is it possible to resist – including by the forces of cinema – the fact that the memory of the war becomes a weapon of propaganda?

Probably not resist. But to heal, to heal wounds – yes. And to prevent, to identify symptoms, offering some kind of vision of the course of treatment. And of course, telling the truth is the most bitter pill that should be in our diet.

One of the episodes of the film is a tour of the panorama, where the guide tells the fifth-graders that in the war you need to kill the enemy with anything, even with your teeth. Have you ever experienced that you are shooting shots with one goal and task, with one intention, and the camera sees something completely different?

Yes. But in this particular case, I knew very well what I was shooting. I filmed different attitudes towards the memory of the war. And Astafiev’s monologue about repentance comes right up against this speech of the guide and the children who play with machine guns.

Before the episode with the guide, you show the dialogue of the hero with his grandfather, where he says: “Dima, panoramas are good, but what about your personal life?” And the hero replies that the panoramas are his children, who will raise other children. And then you show the process of this upbringing.

You saw everything correctly. This is my question to Dima: does he see it? Does he see how his enthusiasm, his sincerity can be used? Because I see it, and that’s why I left this episode so that the viewer can see a three-dimensional picture of the actions that he performs and the consequences that stand behind these actions. And the fact that he, of course, is responsible for these “children” of his.

Do you have an answer to the question of what attracts such a young man as Dima to the topic of the Second World War? Why is he and his team literally obsessed with the past?

I have two answers, one is very simple and specific, and the other is mystical. I’ll start with the simple and obvious: the ideology of our present is based on the past, and especially now this is already visible to absolutely everyone. And on the unprocessed past, unreleased, misunderstood. The past, whose dark sides are forgotten, they are deliberately erased from memory, and literally before our eyes, black becomes white. And when Evdokia, the niece of the soldier reburied by Dima on the Nevsky Piglet, comes to his grave, she, among other things, says: you fought in vain, because we destroyed the Soviet Union. These are terrible words, and the most terrible thing about them is the sincerity with which she pronounces them.

And the second answer – it already concerns the hero himself. He is connected by some mental force with those who are underground, as if they have been knocking on him all his life: “We are here, we are here, we are here” – and he hears them. Maybe he does not quite understand what they are asking him, but he definitely hears. They seem to have chosen him. When we were on the Nevsky patch, we sat on a bench, and there is such a beautiful stele, in memory of the fallen soldiers. And Dima suddenly says that under this bench he literally found the remains of a soldier. They began to dig further, and there again and again – and it turned out that there was a whole trench where twenty soldiers were lying. He even has a monologue in the film, where he says that after death he will meet them all there, they will tell him: “Great!” I wonder what they will say to him after? Because the expression on their face is not very friendly now. No smile.

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