V–A–C Sreda online magazine concludes its final three-month programme on significant cultural phenomena of the past that are now almost forgotten or considered extinct, but nevertheless continue to exist.
In this issue, we publish excerpts from the diary of filmmaker Roman Mikhailov, which is forthcoming from Individuum.
From the introduction, Mikhailov establishes the point of departure for his writing: “It is only natural for a person to write down everything they are able to think about the subjects that interest them.” Throughout these diary entries, Mikhailov reflects on music, rhythm, and the nature of impressions, while returning to dreams and childhood memories. The diary—or, as the filmmaker himself calls it, the “aesthetic treatise”—becomes a way of observing how thought, image, and experience itself come into being.
These are mainly diary entries, gathered over a year and a half. They will probably be of interest to those who value our films and productions, and want to have a look behind the scenes. And perhaps to some others too. Or to no one. To write a text of no interest to anybody would be an interesting task. But it would seem this is not such a case. No, definitely not no one. This text will garner a certain interest from certain people—that’s indisputable. And that’s good. That’s enough for it to be published.
This is a frank experience of and reflection on music, rhythm, and impressions. My aesthetic treatise. While one has the courage, one should publish. It’s a good thing that this was not written by hand but in fragments on the computer, and, furthermore, that these fragments were sent to friends. Had this been written on paper as a single copy, I would have burnt it or buried it under the light of the moon long ago, muttering “such things as these cannot be shown.” Too intimate. But now it is day, a light sky shines through the window, and everywhere one hears that “only candid things can be interesting in our world.” All the rest has already been said. Yes, and this too has also already been said. Well and so what? I will repeat[it again. To someone, it will seem new and remarkable.
More than ten years ago, I wrote something titled a treatise on patterns. Then two more years passed and a treatise on languages appeared. And then another two and a half and a treatise on memory and ritual. These three books please some, there was recognition, people wrote that in these texts there were many things that they had guessed at but had been either too afraid or too lazy to say out loud. These texts also elicited bewilderment, but that’s always how it happens, it’s nothing to be surprised by. Generally speaking, it is only natural for a person to write down everything they are able to think about the subjects that interest them… Patterns, languages, rituals. And now, rhythm. And music, and impressions. Yes, in a certain way, this might be considered the fourth part.
I will say it straight away. At the end is a Fairytale—almost a play. If someone wants to stage it, I will be nothing but happy. You don’t have to ask for permission. Put it on, if you like it. In fact, all of this text might be considered as a play and separated into different voices. Yes, it’s a play! And don’t let it bother you that there is no division into roles or traditional dramaturgical structure. It’s a play all the same. Not just a fairytale, but the Songs of the Djiin as well. Someone someday will dare to stage it all. On a black stage in yellow light.
And so. Patterns, languages, rituals, rhythms. Is that all? No, there is still something else, but I won’t reveal what exactly now.
No, no, don’t think I am beginning with a kind of grandiosity. It isn’t grandiosity, just theatrical habit. To bring out a narrator at the start of a production to warn or amuse. Just an awkward guy in a jacket and hat. Who comes out and mumbles. This was the case in my production thirty years ago, then twenty years ago, ten years ago, and now, this year. One and the same opening. Dear friends, read, become indignant, rejoice. Yes, what will be shall be. One day we will all end up in the magical school, and then everything really will begin.
Imagine a gnome rushing across a fiery land to the sound of 1980s computer games, dashing into his house, burrowing under the duvet, piling pillows over himself, freezing, and falling asleep. And there you have it! This text is the diary of his dreams.
No, no. Everything is very serious.
Impressions are traces left by someone or something in consciousness. This is how they are usually understood. What consciousness is, and how traces appear in it is a subject best not approached—we would only get confused. When someone skips, or when someone is dragged across snow-covered ground, we are left with different traces. Traces, in general, are what remains, and impressions are what remains and even persists in thought. But thoughts here are not absolutely necessary. An impression does not need to be reflected on, it can flare up or flicker without entering the stream of thought. An impression can be dreamed or appear in the ravings of a fever. In the end, an impression is a kind of residue.
Can you recreate your past impressions of, say, film? It’s clear that fully recreating them isn’t possible, but they can be re-created in some way. You’re ten years old, you’re sitting on the sofa, looking at the screen, something is happening there, it enters your consciousness, forces you to look closer. It might have been absolutely unclear and incomprehensible, but for some reason it arises when you close your eyes and fall asleep. Try it. You will likely encounter a difficulty: it is not so easy to distinguish impressions of film from impressions of the world in general, to say where it was that the strange person with the big round face that remains in your memory passed by: at the cinema or beside your house. Or if he was just a dream, and never was in this reality. But even if he was a dream, he also became a part of the real—he can be remembered, his life can be reflected on. That which remains in us is a fulminating mix of difficultly-expressed images and feelings. Sometimes a person is hiding there, it is his dark lair, full of ghosts. This said there ghosts—more on this a little later.
There are a number of image-events…. and I cannot make out in my memory: did I see them in film or did they take place in everyday life. Neighbours at a table didn’t share something. A middle-aged man splashed the contents of a teapot onto the portrait of a dead relative, onto a photograph in a frame on the wall. How could I have been present? On the other hand, what kind of film is it? A person in a black and white photograph—calm, poised, confident. And here the neighbour who poured out the contents, apparently having become angry, apparently without the boldness to send his rage onto someone of the living, but able to do so to the dead.
Second fragment. My father is standing by a tree and looking in at our window. Rain is pouring, he is soaked through, but continues to stand immobile. This is clearly not a scene from a film—it never made it to the screen—though it could easily have merged with the image of some character. Perhaps it wasn’t him who stood and looked at the window like that, but another character, and in my mind this character became him. And the window, of course, wasn’t ours, but someone else’s. Yes, and there was also a touching piece of music playing, the kind that was in films at the end of the 70s. Picture the scene, and, for example, a score by Rybnikov. A solitary person stands, in tears or rain, it’s hard to tell, while a melody plays, something like “the night’s spring breeze will bring you a sigh from me.”
There is an important distinction between viewing films then and now. Then we couldn’t rewatch them as we wished. Now there is the possibility of rewatching any film, of pausing, of winding back or forwards. While before, we could watch only what was shown on television, we had no control over the content and virtually no choice. It was like the flow of time, in which you exist. Or rather three flows of time, because there were three channels. You can turn off, turn on, choose one of three channels, adjust the volume—that’s it. True, there were rare people with video recorders—the well-off, so to speak—who experienced Soviet reality in their own way. They, probably, had a different perception of film. Once someone asked me, I don’t remember who exactly, what I would have done if I had had a video recorder. For some reason I answered—I remember this answer perfectly—that I would have paused the film and drawn out the frames in a notebook. For some reason. Now it isn’t easy to understand from where such a desire arose, but it is natural: it is the desire to capture fleeting images and make it possible to study them closely.
The television was something like a fortochka into another world, a portal to something that had no relationship to the real. No one saw the people who were shown there, and, furthermore, no one knew anyone who would have seen them. Our former neighbour Uncle Sasha sometimes visited us, asked permission to watch television, sat right down on the carpet, hugged his knees, and stared fixedly at the flickering images on the screen, almost not blinking. He had a peculiar kind of sensitivity, he would sometimes go out into the courtyard in the morning and cry out like a seagull.
About seagulls, by the way. They would fly into our courtyard, dig into the dustbins, and drag cellophane bags filled with red liquid across the asphalt in their beaks. The neighbours said this was because there were no longer any fish in the sea, which left the birds with nothing to do but who knows what to baffle crows and pigeons. All this in silence. But sometimes they would let out morbid cries. As if this silence had gathered up inside them and burst forth in a desperate quack. In Uncle Sasha too. He watched television with a kind of unhealthy thirst, afraid of missing an important message. Any moment now they will pronounce something invaluable, of import to his existence. For an hour or two, no one has pronounced anything, but any moment now it will happen. They ask “Uncle Sasha, are you watching attentively?” Yes, attentively. That’s very good, well done.
Why watch all of this? Really, it was incomprehensible, but many people became accustomed to living with the television turned on. A little later, at the start of the 1990s, such a life proved a costly pleasure, it was no longer so simple to pay the electricity bill. But, again, loopholes were found. If the meter was located inside the apartment, and not in the communal stairwell, a magnet would sometimes be placed on it, and it would stop turning. Such practices were punished by large fines, and those who contrived to live in such a way spent years hiding from prowling inspectors. You couldn’t open the door to just anyone, had to look carefully through the peephole if the doorbell rang. And that was all you needed to do to watch unlimited television.
At some point I wanted to write a story about a settlement like ours. It rained for days on end and, instead of a courtyard, a lake formed—or a pond, whichever you prefer. Residents peered at the reflection of the sky in the water and saw angels there. As long as the water remained in the courtyard, the angels were visible. One of the residents immediately went to pray, decided to change his life, for another nothing changed. I don’t even remember how I meant to end this story. The houses around would have been compared to the rim of a large bowl, the water with its contents. And people tried to avoid confirming in words what they saw, only glanced at one another, trying to assure themselves it wasn’t their own hallucination.
Over the last couple years, I have rewatched many Soviet films, especially the films of the Riga studio, trying to feel their rhythms. Mirage, He, She, and the Children, Garden with a Ghost, The Long Road to the Dunes—I saw all of this in childhood, and some fragments of these films have merged with my dreams. The actor’s physicality there is completely different, it's hard to imagine it in contemporary film. The actor does not work with his role, he works with the space around him, creating a kind of aura, an aura that the camera captures. If he doesn’t pay attention to the space around him, he falls out of the frame.
The films of the Riga Film Studio are children’s dreams, dark and boring. But dreams are meant to be boring, otherwise a person wouldn’t get any rest.
Someday, I’ll tell the whole truth about the Latvian SSR of the 80s. Well not quite the whole truth… the truth that I know.
It was all similar to the painstaking work of an elderly artist. He took the necessary shades of blue and grey, and light-brown too, and mixed them unhurriedly, swirling the paintbrush in the litre jar, then applied the paint to the canvas, ever so quietly, ever so gently. Amidst the cries of the seagulls, the gaze of the sea, the whisper of the abyss, the frozen smiles of dead neighbours.
White babbling sheep on the waves, dust in the air, images in the mirror, divided into three parts, everything, absolutely everything is suffused with anticipation. There is an unseen presence nearby, it embraces us.
Grandmother sorts through things in a cupboard, rearranges her bonds and her “Hero of Labour” medals (or medals for labour valour—to my shame, I have forgotten which) and hums the songs of Tolkunova. The floors are wooden, creaking, there are clouded peepholes in the doors, old bicycles and endless jars of jam and pickles in the basement. Winter will come, and we’ll devour it all.
I remember a July evening of 83 perfectly. We are by the eighth building, nothing in particular is happening, but the air is steeped with some kind of warmth and attentiveness, I understand that I need to go home, I run to the entrance, go up to the fourth floor, and then look from the balcony to where I have run from and hear a faint hum—the hum of existence. It is a state of grace, it envelops us all. And this feeling is not just mine, it is all of ours. Everyone feels this and no one knows how to express it, they just stand still and smile.
It isn’t easy for me to recall all this, it immediately begins to draw me somewhere. And then later on pain begins, completely different images… If someday I film this, I will have to weep everyday on set, I won’t have a nerve left by the time the film wraps.
It sounds naive, right? But such a naive quality shapes our culture in many ways.
You can make out dragons in the pleats of a duvet. Or the story of the kidnapping of a beloved from a castle, with a chase on a boat, along the water at night, with a babbling brook, that conceals the heroes. Perhaps it’s this way with childhood impressions too. They remain securely stored in our memory, and when they come up to surface, they elicit nothing but bewilderment from others.
Once again, impressions from film are not so easy to distinguish from impressions in general. Where did this take place? In film, in sleep, or in imagination? Or was it an overheard and later embellished story? It didn’t happen anywhere, but for some reason, persists vividly in memory.
On the 11th of May I dreamed of the “theory of impressions.” At the beginning was an old courtyard, I was drifting through it, a gypsy stood nearby, smiling and encouraging. Then a mist descended over the entire courtyard, and all this haze seemed to be the source of future impressions. You could mould what produces impressions from it.
This haze is the substance from which impressions of film, literature, and painting will be built. And, perhaps, all of them are rooted there, in the courtyard of childhood. Has a film left an impression on you? In a way, it had already been shown there. Has a painting impressed you? It was painted then, within that mist.
1917 saw the publication of the musicologist Leonid Sabaneev’s Rhythm. The work begins with an examination of primitive definitions of rhythm such as patterns of note duration. The work then describes a desire to move away from temporal arts and to understand the nature of rhythm itself. Various conceptions of rhythm as order are considered, and the author comes to a remarkable conclusion. Rhythm is the principle of least action in art. Furthermore, form must be absorbed by content, otherwise “the principle of rhythm will not be realised.” Sabaneev also states that “that which appears a source of constraint in fact proves the source of beauty.” The stripping away of the superfluous, the appearance of the perfect through rhythm—this is what I have been occupied with for almost all of my conscious life.
Varèse writes of rhythm as a binding principle, as that which prevents disintegration. He also saw moving bodies of sentient sounds as constituent elements of spatial music. He made a number of interesting statements, for example, that subjectively, noise is simply a sound one dislikes. He noticed another interesting thing—that Indian melodic lines, when played in reverse, have a smooth flow, almost the same as when played normally, and that to Eastern musicians, Western music appears disjointed, jagged.
A truly interesting remark… what distinguishes Western music from Eastern music?
Eastern music can be played in reverse and remain essentially itself, while Western music would cause bewilderment.
John Cage, meanwhile, defines rhythm as the relationship between stretches of time. No one has so keen a sense of time as musicians. And who has delved deeper into the concept of rhythm than Messiaen? He proposes dozens of definitions of rhythm, then reaches for something more subtle than these formulations. He wanders between Bergson, Thomas Aquinas, magical systems, and Indian theories of rhythm. Messiaen’s Monologues are among the most interesting texts of recent times. He tells us that birds sing better at dawn and dusk because they are inspired by the colours of the sky.
When I first heard Messiaen, it seemed to me like a chthonic Schnittke. The music is very cinematic, it sounds like a film score. Something is taking place on the screen. Though there is no screen. There are mosaics of coloured stone, painted time. (Bergson posits time-as-time and time-as-space, he attends to pure, spatial duration, seeking to understand what is closest to perception. Time as tick-tock.)
Rhythm is what keeps existence from disintegration.
(The components of rhythm according to Messiaen. The ordering of such concepts as duration, intensity, pitch, timbre, relief, pause… in his works, the absences within the text correspond to musical silence. Later, he establishes a strange law of rhythmicity, related to periodicity, irreversibility, and symmetry. Irreversible rhythms everywhere…)
What else is interesting… he believed the foundations of musical culture—at least its melodic aspect—to have been laid before humankind, in the world of the birds. The sources of all melodies lie there. Man gradually uncovers what birds feel.
(I listened ten times to “The Festival of Beautiful Waters.” There was Something that split into music and language. Rhythm was there as a principle. Messiaen’s “sound clouds” and “sound dust” can be found in film. “Clouds of images,” “image dust.” They differ from one another in terms of transparency, density, and intensity.
(“Clouds of images,” and “image dust”... Dreams are pieced together from them. And there is something else. When you dive under water, but keep your eyes open. Depth beyond images. From these three, dreams are composed.)
Ligeti once described a childhood dream. He is in his room, but cannot pass through to bed due to a great number of dense webs. Everything is swarming with insects, everything undulates and changes. This dream had a profound influence on his later work. It seems to me it wasn’t quite a dream. This condition would be better termed a visionary eruption. Such things happen. The room where a person sleeps or spends a lot of time remains familiar but becomes filled with god knows what. Strange guests, flickering creatures, shining grasshoppers, moths, and jellyfish for chandeliers. Something similar happened to me in 2012, in Princeton. A couple years later, I came upon a copy of what I had seen while looking through the artwork of psychiatric patients. It was as though we had been in the same place, at the same time, looked upon this being on the ceiling with the same eyes. Ligeti has compositions that resemble the rustle of insects, punctuated by the voices of God knows what. A chorus of trembling tiny creatures.
May 27
Decided on the cast. I hope I won’t have made a mistake.
May 30
Yesterday someone called out to me in the subway. It turned out to be singers, we had put on a production in a dark room three years ago, I had conducted, or done what I could, louder-softer, waving my arms about. A remarkable coincidence, given we need angel-singers for the production right now.
I dreamed I was going up the staircase in my old building. I had to go up and look out the window. That was the goal. As if a special view would be revealed. On the third floor, laundry was hanging out to dry, and a viscosity set in. I couldn’t go up, I couldn’t pass, for some reason.
Today I was re-reading the Acts of the Apostles and came upon a fragment where people are cured after Paul’s handkerchiefs and aprons are laid on them.
The shadow of Peter, the handkerchiefs and aprons of Paul, the burning of books on sorcery worth fifty thousands drahms… “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
June 2
I woke up and understood that the play needs circularity, the repetition of one and the same scene at the beginning and at the end. And that it needs to be a wedding scene. A celestial wedding, an earthly wedding. Angels blow on dandelions, and snow flies out from them, producing a snowy wedding. Or differently: angels collapse into a meadow with faded dandelions, and snow comes.
In the end, we spent all day discussing dandelions with the artist.
June 5
I had a dream. I was running for the train, leapt in at the last moment. And I realised that it would pass a cemetery.
June 7
I dreamt of a place and of Fr. A. I wanted to say something to him, but I wasn’t able to. I only voiced all kinds of grievances about myself. Then I lay down, he approached me and lay his hand on my head, as though he were blessing me. Then some kind of bishop appeared in a rich red vestment, and Fr. A. rushed over to him, kissed his panagia and dropped to his knees. The bishop seemed not to be one of ours, but from some Eastern church, or even not of this time, ancient.
We decided to use vertical screens. Strips with projections.
L. wrote: “Eisenstein, in America, in the hall where they presented the Oscars, tried to argue that the horizontal screen was a relic of the theatrical epoch of cinematography. Yet in America in the first half of the twentieth century, the horizontal screen was axiomatic.” And he also sent an excerpt from the lecture:
One might surmise that the transition to verticality presages or even provokes the transition from narrative to image, from “then and there” to “here and now.” In short, from diegesis to mimesis. Furthermore, the horizontal format frames the scene or opens a window to the world, while the vertical format, especially in the case of icons or portraits, lays claim to immediate presence or spectral absence, or, as we will see, to spectral presence.
June 16
I saw the kitchen of my old apartment in a dream, but I took for a graveyard. My grandmother was there, and I told her we needed to find our place there. Then she began to take her leave, and left farewell notes in the doorway and on the table. I read them and cried.
The reading of classics on stage does not necessarily need to take place through a transposition of the plot. A well-known text can serve as a kind of backdrop or manifest as a general “recognition.” The fabula of the action can be absolutely different, and the recognition will come from evident associative connections—much like how it happens in thought—through flashes of fleeting images, through rhythm and melody. O.G. sent an excerpt from “Abduction and Dream,” from Glinka’s Ruslan and Liudmila. It sounds like a requiem, a kind of falling. And something without a bottom.
In the morning I leafed through Anikst’s book on the theory of drama.
Works on aesthetics can resemble a manual for a puppet theatre. Everything is obvious and already stated. There seems to be something going on here. It’s obvious, until it is put into practice, until you find yourself in that room with the balcony, the sofa, on which the viewer is sitting. He sits, watches, and waits. He attentively listens to everything you tell him.
June 18
Today I met with K. G. He talked about virology in the study of manuscripts.
I dreamed again that we were standing in the kitchen with my grandmother, looking at the vegetable gardens through the window. Then and there, in the dream, a performance began, and the modes of vision were screens and rhythms, and everything sounded with pure authenticity. Grids with images, curtains, angles.
Two similar dreams divided by two nights. Kitchen, grandmother, cemetery. The kitchen is not a kitchen at all, but a strange place, trees and bushes grow outside the window, or do not.
Dark thought is what occurs in pre-sleep states, such thinking has its own principles and inspirations, they often dissolve when you jerk awake and return to pure consciousness. Dark philology is the same thing. In fact it resembles a detective story. You feel your way around, without a flashlight, disentangling the emerging connections as you go. Disentanglement can only occur with eyes closed, you open them and everything evaporates.
(Perhaps they hide the truth from you not out of selfishness, but from a desire to protect you. And perhaps they don’t know what to say. Everyone is trying to reassure you).
In the morning I read criticism of Blue Bird, it’s interesting how precisely they discuss the need for clear action. Without action there is no theatre, it becomes boring. Action is overcoming and changing. Talking sugar and screaming bread do not constitute action. If the critics of those times had entered the theatre a little later, they would have been blinded with sadness. Nothing happens, everyone moves around quietly and waits for something.
Today I came up with the image of wires hanging out the window of a train. From pole to pole. Like yarn, like time, like the ticking of a clock. Three girls return home on a train, look out the window, see nature rushing by, wrapped in wires.
June 30
Yesterday I was at this event. A dark hall with columns, a hundred people, half of which were making strange movements. There were three of us, three judges, renowned dancers and choreographers alongside me. We had to choose first thirty people, then twelve, then three. For some reason, they called me to judge other people’s dancing and movement. Music blared, people writhed, jumped, though some danced very gracefully. Sometimes they approached the microphone and sang or made sounds similar to the voices of seagulls. It was like a dream, as though I had just to open my eyes to see a white ceiling or tree out the window. This said, there was no anxiety whatsoever—it was a blissful atmosphere of some kind of bodily creation. It was not so simple to distinguish the serious dancers from those who had simply come to bask in the spotlight. Afterwards, I asked them about their lives, aspirations, and dreams for a long time. And thanked them for this experience. A kind of blissful Dionysian spirit, with a faintly cultish feeling.
When I was fourteen, I was given a copy of The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. A Dionysian side-note. I’ve decided to re-read it.
Magic transformation is the presupposition of all dramatic art.
luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night.
Music is a language capable of endless signification. (This, in fact, is not from Nietzsche)
(and more on the nature of the recitative)
A potent text. I understand it much better than I did when I was 14.