This art-film is an imaginary documentary film about a man who sets off from Paris to Siberia in search of his father’s past: His father was a communist who had voluntarily gone from France to the Soviet Union to work on a big engineering project in Magadan. Now his adult son travels by train from Paris, through the Ukraine into the depths of Russia, in search of the values and ideas that had been so relevant to his father. The title of the film alludes to Lenin’s definition of communism: communism equals Soviets plus electricity. (Soviets are councils).

The movie is a collage of sounds and images, a conceptual salad of emotions and perceptions during this trip: Conversations are followed by a voice reading Lenin’s works, pictures of Ukrainian peasants enjoying an eclipse, and classic images of Eastern European train travel are all part of the film. This movie was supposedly filmed on Soviet film rolls, which is why the color is slightly reddish – the films had been stored in a fridge somewhere in the Former Soviet Union for several years until the director decided to use them.

This film is most enjoyable if you have had some previous experience traveling in Eastern Europe, and/or if you like conceptual art. This film is not recommendable for those who prefer straightforward narrative and a clear plot. I personally enjoyed this film very much, I think it is a remarkable artistic experiment. (IMDB)

https://nitro.download/view/7D17E0D016164AD/Les_Soviets_plus_l_electricite_(Nicolas_Rey,_2002).part1.rar https://nitro.download/view/59C1EEAE1F1F0FB/Les_Soviets_plus_l_electricite_(Nicolas_Rey,_2002).part2.rar https://nitro.download/view/4251DC4B29E9311/Les_Soviets_plus_l_electricite_(Nicolas_Rey,_2002).part3.rar https://nitro.download/view/6545AB7EC344E2B/Les_Soviets_plus_l_electricite_(Nicolas_Rey,_2002).part4.rar https://nitro.download/view/15BF362EFB5341D/Les_Soviets_plus_l_electricite_(Nicolas_Rey,_2002).part5.rar

DVD extras: DVD5
DVD Format: PAL
DVD Audio: Stereo
Program: Unknown
Menus: Untouched
Video: Untouched
Audio: Untouched
DVD extras: None

Language(s):French, Russian
Subtitles:English, German

The post Nicolas Rey – Les soviets plus l’électricité (2002) (DVD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Based on fragments from Günther Anders’ novel The Molussian Catacomb, which was written between 1932 and 1936, Nicolas Rey’s captivating nine-part film presents allegorical stories and musings by political prisoners sitting in the pits of an imaginary fascist state called Molussia. Shown in random order whenever it is screened (there are 362,880 potential versions of the film), the film’s nine 16mm reels ruminate on capitalism, imperialism and resistance—accompanied by gritty, unsettling self-processed images of undefined landscapes. A haunting and moving meditation on brutality and control, differently, Molussia has galvanized audiences at festivals around the world.

Since 1993 Rey has been making films that hover between photography, documentaries and the avant-garde. He is one of the founders of the Paris-based artist film lab L’Abominable. (synopsis from Northwest Film Forum)

Quote:
Nine short, individually titled reels of colour 16mm film, which are presented in a random order determined before each screening. Drawing on a text by German philosopher Gunther Anders, the film is an imaginary documentary about Molussia, a fictional totalitarian country that Anders invented to represent the dystopia of fascism.

https://nitro.download/view/0BE0DFDDB8A2014/Nicolas_Rey_-_(2012)_Differently,_Molussia.rar

Language(s):German
Subtitles:Englis

The post Nicolas Rey – Autrement, la Molussie AKA Differently, Molussia (2012) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
A film that starts like an odd documentary on ski resorts suddenly declares its subject to be aluminum. And it’s all downhill from there, evoking in chapters the history of capitalism in the 20th century, the death of the God Progress in the valleys of the Alps and the question of the relationship between State and Industry. All’s fair in love and snow.

Nicolas Rey: wasn’t named after the famous American director (he’s the one that had a pseudonym) and he’s not even the son of the French experimental filmmaker Georges Rey. He’s been making films since 1993, productions hovering somewhere between photography, documentaries and experimental films. He spends most of his time at “L’Abominable”, an artist-run film lab he helped founding in 1995.

Magic Mountains

Could it be by chance? Two of the richest and most accomplished works we have seen in the festival are set in the mountains, and even more coincidently in the Alps, somewhere above the city of Grenoble. In Didam and Tahousse, two films that can be seen as a diptych, Mahine Rouhi and Olivier Fouchard set their cameras in grandiose virgin landscapes and edit their film to the rolling of thunder or the shadow of a cloud passing. The intense work on the film medium (colors, contrasts, negatives) reinstates nature as piercingly primeval, the origin of the world so distressing for mankind (who appears from time to time as a fragile silhouette wandering in the open space), reminding us of Carl Brown’s films, in which the photochemical work brings us back to a world of initial sensations, and of Jose Val Del Omar’s cosmogonic cinema to which one could reasonably doubt there was such a beautiful lineage. Although it is probably more of an accident, the similarities are striking: the atmospheric fast-motion, the mysterious ode to elementary forces that the images convey, the tinting that, far from “colorizing” nature, brings out the hidden and the timeless in it.

Nicolas Rey’s film Schuss! could seem to have an opposite goal, since the mountains he films have been harnessed and made profitable for ski resorts and the hydroelectricity-reliant aluminum industry. The film is organized in chapters repeating the same structure made from heterogeneous elements (portraits of skiers filmed with an old color system rebuilt by the filmmaker and giving the shots a ghostly aura; rolling facsimiles of reports of the board of directors of an electrometallurgy company; comments by the filmmaker about the links between industry and war; old amateur films on 9.5mm showing in particular skiing in an early resort, etc.) forming a work of historical research whose materialist principle — to produce a meaningful constellation through editing — recalls Walter Benjamin’s work on 19th century Paris. Starting from a comparative postulate (cinema, aluminum and ski industries were born around the same time and have witnessed parallel growth to the rhythm of war efforts in the first half of the past century), the filmmaker undertakes an archeology of the historical strata of that “mountain” seen as a symptom of the century, confronting the telltale signs of its industrial past with its timeless present of silhouettes sliding down the white hills, almost disappearing into the film material. And maybe the most striking image is a shot of skiers appearing out of the grainy, timeless mist of what is probably the arrival of a cable car, surprisingly resembling a milestone in the history of cinema: workers leaving a factory. Suddenly, their apparently innocent activity represents catastrophe: man harnessing nature through his industry, only to accelerate his own end, forever going schuss!

From the virgin mountains to overexploited mountains, the same tragic morality pertains (a fact that could make these films close to some of Straub’s, albeit their formal choices): mountains stand alone, as do men, and their solitudes seem forever non-reconciled.

Emeric de Lastens

Festival des cinémas différents de Paris, december 2005.

https://nitro.download/view/B232FBCD2993939/schuss!.avi
https://nitro.download/view/AFCF294AF4BCC02/schuss_.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Nicolas Rey – Schuss! (2005) first appeared on Cinema of the World.