NECROREALISM
I have been intrigued by the Russian Necrorealism film movement since I first read about it in the catalogue to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, exhibition “Gothic” from 1997, but to date I have yet to see any of the films themselves. This year, in conjunction with a focus on “parallel cinema” from Russia at the International Film Festival Rotterdam Film, the festival has selected Yevgeni Yufit, a former student of Aleksander Sokurov and founder (in 1984/85) of the St. Petersburg-based Necrorealism film movement, as a Filmmaker in Focus. The festival will screen eight short films by Yufit and present the world premiere of his Hubert Bals-funded film Bipedalism.
According to this downloadable PDF from a Russian Film Symposium in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 2001:
“Necrorealism appeared in Leningrad at the beginning of the 1980s, when socialism was still alive. As a system, however, it was more dead than alive, and although few believed that the corpse of the system would soon be buried, everyone understood that it no longer showed signs of life, evidenced by the gerintocracy, the death of one secretary general after another, the stagnation in the economic sphere, the negligible number of adherents to the ruling ideology, the absence of any sort of collective enthusiasm, and the demise of the aesthetic principles of socialist realism…
“In these conditions there existed a certain human, asocial mass, oriented away from generally accepted, rational, cultured activities. A portion of this mass was subsequently shaped into the artistic movement known as Necrorealism…
“The theme of death became a nexus of protest…”
-
Anonymous
