From October 21, 2016 till January 29, 2017, the ROSIZO Gallery at VDNH (Culture Pavilion No. 66) will host the Cinema Time exhibition. This is a multidisciplinary project that is being held as part of the Year of Russian Cinema and combines films from the "Golden Reserve" of Soviet and Russian cinema with artistic works of modern Russian artists.
Emotional portraits of the epoch
The exposition contains five sections and each one presents a distinctive emotional portrait of an epoch: Time of Enthusiasm, Time of Propaganda, Time of Fragility/Hope and Loss, Time with No Time and Time of Chaos and Search. In each section, multimedia screens will show excerpts from the most famous Russian films as well as versions of them in the modern format of promotional videos and trailers. The same environment will host pieces of art that reflect the figurative zeitgeist of the epoch in the language of modern art.
A triangle of perception
This triad of visualisation helps us look at the epoch from three different points of view: the way it was perceived by the audience of that time, the way it would be perceived by a modern movie goer who is used to the condensed format of promotional videos and teasers, and finally the way it is perceived by the "eternity" that artists traditionally address their pieces to.
Personally experience the "spirit of the times"
The exhibition curator Dmitry Likin and cinema historian Mikhail Trofimenkov have represented the history of Russian society using movies and pieces of contemporary art that were significant for various generations (photographs, pictures, art objects and installations) and served as a link between the past and the present. The exhibition doesn't offer a linear timeline (revolution, NEP, collectivisation, repressions, war, reconstruction, thaw period, stagnation, etc.) but a paradigm of perception that provides a private, intimate experience of the "spirit of the times".
Cult films
Thus, the Time of Enthusiasm is expressed in films by Yakov Protazanov, Nikolai Ekka and Grigory Aleksandrov, and the Time of Propaganda is crowned by a canonical example of social realism — Cuban Cossacks by Ivan Pyryev, which is compatible with works by Irina Korina, Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt and Boris Orlov.
And the completely different Time of Fragility/Hope and Loss (Spring on Zarechnaya Street, Once Again About Love, Nine Days in One Year, Romance for Lovers and others) shares common ground with works of romantics of modern art like Leonid Tishkov, Viktor Pivovarov, Dmitry Gutov, Anya Zhyolud, Yury Avvakumov and Sergei Shutov.
The stagnation of the 1970s (Time with No Time), masterfully reflected in Several Days of I.I. Oblomov by Nikita Mikhalkov and in Roman Balayan's existential drama Flights in Dreams and in Reality, acquires a new dimension with the absurdist Slogan-1977, created by the Collective Actions group at about the same time.
The autumn of the empire ends with an explosion. Russia's difficult 1980–1990s (Time of Chaos and Search), symbolised by the Little Vera and Brother-2 films, are reinterpreted through the works of Vladimir Dubosarsky and Aleksandr Vinogradov, AES group, and the very young artists Anna Pototskaya and Grigory Selsky.
Cinema Time is an attempt to comprehend the zeitgeist of different epochs and understand why we appreciate each of them. This is a story about what unites generations and makes them a society. It is an appeal to our common emotional memory and to what is close to each of us.