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Clownery16 mm, 53 min., color and b&w, 1989-2005
The tragicomedy of the absurd, is based on the works of Daniil Kharms (1905-1942).
Trying to recreate reality 30s, who came to the flowering of creativity Harms, the director plays the style of filming, acting at that time and enters into the picture, "the aged" sound. Thus, it is possible to achieve maximum reliability of the author's text and sound to help the viewer to immerse themselves in the atmosphere in which he lived and worked classic absurdity. This is - a world of illusions, allusions and associations, reflecting a stream of consciousness of the creator living in an era of silence.
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Director and camera - Dmitri Frolov
Cast: Dmitri Shibanov, Dmitri Frolov, Natalya Sourkova, Alexey Zaharov, Viktoriya Zlotnikova, Mark Nahamkin, Yevgeniy Suhonenkov, Alexey Frolov, Alexandr Kostin, Yakov Shmayev, Vyacheslav Gridin
Music: Dmitry Shostakovich, popular melodies 30s
Russian premiere - XI Russian Film Festival "Literature and Cinema", Gatchina, February-March, 2005
- 🏆Special Award "Through thorns to the stars" for the new language in cinema (International Festival of Independent Cinema "Pure Dreams - VIII", November 2005)
- FINALIST on The Flight Deck Film Festival, New York City, NY, United States, July 2020
- 🏆Best Experimental Feature, 🏆Best Director Feature, 🏆Best Actor Feature, 🏆Best Actress Feature, Global Monthly Online Film Competition, Canada, September, 2020
- 🏆Best Experimental Feature, 🏆Best Editing at Madras Independent Film Festival, Chennai, India, November, 2020
- 🏆Best Director Experimental Film at Best Director Award, London, United Kingdom, November, 2020
- 🏆Honorable mention at Cinemaking International Film Festival, Bangladesh, December, 2020
- 🏆Best Cinematography of Feature Film, 🏆Best Sound Design/Mix of Feature Film, 🏆Best Production Design of Feature Film, 🏆Best Costume Design of Feature Film, 🏆Best Feature Film Poster at Gralha International Monthly Film Awards, Curitiba, Brazil, February, 2021
- 🏆Best Experimental Feature at Accord Cine Fest, Mumbai, India. April, 2021
- 🏆Best European Experimental Feature at Continental Film Awards, India, May, 2021
- Nominee at The World's Best Self Funded Films - CPFF Qualifying Film Festival, October, 2021
- Finalist at Shiny Sparkle Independent Online Film Festival, January, 2022
- 🏆Best Experimental Film at Art Gallery Film Festival, Chennai, India, February, 2022
- 🏆Special Mention at Hallucinea Film Festival, Paris, France, February, 2022
- 🏆BEST DIRECTOR at Ipê Amarelo Film Festival, Brazil, April, 2022
- 🏆SPECIAL FESTIVAL MENTION, 🏆BEST ACTRESS IN FEATURE FILM ( 1ST RANK ) at Indie World Film Festival, Wayanad, India, April, 2022
- NOMINEE - - "Best Director of Medium-Length Film" - "Best Screenplay of Medium-Length Film" - "Best Sound Design of Medium-Length Film" - "Best CInematography of Medium-Length Film" - "Best Editing of Medium-Length Film" - "Best Production Design of Medium-Length Film" - "Best Actor of Medium-Length Film" to Dmitriy Shibanov - "Best Actress of Medium-Length Film" to Natalya Surkova - "Best Supporting Actor of Medium-Length Film" to Dmitri Frolov - "Best Supporting Actress of Medium-Length Film" to Viktoria Zlotnikova - "Best Trailer" - "Best Post-Production"; WINNER - 🏆"Best Editing of Medium-Length Film" at BIMIFF - Brazil International Monthly Independent Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June, 2022
- 🏆Best Feature Film, Special Award; 🏆Best Editing, Special Award; 🏆Best Actor - Dmitriy Shibanov; 🏆Best Actress, Honorable Mention - Natalya Surkova; 🏆Best Supporting Actor - Dmitri Frolov; 🏆Best Supporting Actress - Viktoria Zlotnikova at Eastern Europe Film Festival, Craiova, Romania, June, 2022
- 🏆Special Festival Mention and 🏆Jury Award in Acting at Casablanca Film Factory Awards, Kalpetta, India, June, 2022
- 🏆BEST FEATURE FILM at Golden Wheat Awards, İstanbul, Turkey, September, 2022
- 🏆HONORABLE MENTION at RAINFOREST INDIE FILM FEST, India, October, 2022
- 🏆BEST DIRECTOR IN FEATURE at Hollywood Cinema Beatz Festival, Los Angeles, United States, December, 2022
- 🏆WINNER - Best Classic Filmmaking 🏆Honorable Mention - Feature Film at Golden Reel International Film Festival, Singapore, Singapore, March, 2023
- 🏆 BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE at Elegant International Film Festival, Kolkata, India, September, 2023
- FINALIST at Humro Cinema Film Fest, Pokhra, Nepal, October, 2023
- 🏆 Best Feature Film, 🏆 Best Director, 🏆 Best Editor, 🏆 Best Actress at Hollywood Film Festival of Mollywood, Kalpetta, India, December, 2023
- 🏆 Best Feature Film, 🏆 Special Mention in Acting Award at Hollywood A2Z Film Awards, India, December, 2023
- 🏆 Best Film Production at EMMAS BBC Fest of Multicultural London, United Kingdom, London, United Kingdom, December, 2023
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About Daniil Kharms (1905-1942)
Russian literature seems always able to bring forth a crop of new and
interesting writers who are experimenting somewhere at the frontiers of
literary style, language or story. Among our contemporaries, we think of
Andrey Sinyavsky (alias 'Abram Tertz'), Vasiliy Aksyonov, Sasha Sokolov and
Yevgeniy Popov, along with the women writers who emerged under glasnost',
during the last Soviet years: Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Tatyana Tolstaya and
others. But alongside the new writers, we continue to rediscover the old.
Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrey Platonov, unexpected jewels from the Stalinist
period, only came to prominence decades after their own span. Discoveries
from the 'Silver Age' period (roughly the 1890s to 1917) are still coming or
returning to light. Neglected figures from even further back are now
achieving or recovering a belated but deserved readership (Vladimir Odoevsky
from the Romantic period, Vsevolod Garshin from later in the nineteenth
century). Another fascinating figure, the contemporary of Bulgakov and
Platonov, but with a peculiar resonance for the modern, or indeed the
post-modern, world is Daniil Kharms.
'Daniil Kharms' was the main, and subsequently the sole, pen-name of
Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov. The son of a St. Petersburg political, religious
and literary figure, Daniil was to achieve limited local renown as a
Leningrad avant-garde eccentric and a writer of children's stories in the
1920s and 30s. Among other pseudonyms, he had employed 'Daniil Dandan' and
'Kharms-Shardam'. The predilection for 'Kharms' is thought to derive from
appreciation of the tension between the English words 'charms' and 'harms'
(plus the German Charme; indeed, there is an actual German surname 'Harms'),
but may also owe something to a similarity in sound to Sherlock Holmes
(pronounced 'Kholms' in Russian), a figure of fascination to Kharms.
From 1925 Kharms began to appear at poetry readings and other
avant-garde activities, gained membership of the Leningrad section of the
All-Russian Union of Poets (from 1926), one of the many predecessors to the
eventual Union of Soviet Writers, and published two poems in anthologies in
1926 and 1927. Almost unbelievably, these were the only 'adult' works Kharms
was able to publish in his lifetime. In 1927 Kharms joined together with a
number of like-minded experimental writers, including his talented friend
and close associate Aleksandr Vvedensky (1900-1941) and the major poet
Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903-1958), to form the literary and artistic grouping
Oberiu (the acronym of the 'Association of Real Art').
Representing something of a union between Futurist aesthetics and
Formalist approaches, the Oberiut considered themselves a 'left flank' of
the literary avant-garde. Their publicity antics, including a roof-top
appearance by Kharms, caused minor sensations and they succeeded in
presenting a highly unconventional theatrical evening entitled 'Three Left
Hours' in 1928, which included the performance of Kharms's Kafkaesque
absurdist drama 'Yelizaveta Bam'. Among the Oberiu catch-phrases were 'Art
is a cupboard' (Kharms normally made his theatrical entrances inside or on a
wardrobe) and 'Poems aren't pies; we aren't herring'. However, in the
Stalinising years of the late 1920s, the time for propagating experimental
modernist art had passed. The rising Soviet neo-bourgeoisie were not to be
shocked: tolerance of any such frivolities was plummeting and hostile
journalistic attention ensured the hurried disbandment of the Oberiu group
after a number of further appearances.
Kharms and Vvedensky evidently felt it wiser to allow themselves to be
drawn into the realm of children's literature, writing for publications of
the children's publishing house Detgiz, known fondly as the 'Marshak
Academy', run by the redoubtable children's writer (and bowdleriser of
Robbie Burns), Samuil Marshak, and involving the playwright Yevgeniy
Shvarts. By 1940 Kharms had published eleven children's books and
contributed regularly to the magazines 'The Hedgehog' and 'The Siskin'.
However, even in this field of literary activity, anything out of the
ordinary was not safe. Kharms, in his 'playful' approach to children's
writing, utilised a number of Oberiu-type devices. The Oberiu approach had
been denounced in a Leningrad paper in 1930 as 'reactionary sleight-of-hand'
and, at the end of 1931, Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested, accused of
'distracting the people from the building of socialism by means of
trans-sense verses' and exiled to Kursk. However the exile was fairly brief,
the times being what Akhmatova described as 'relatively vegetarian'.
Nevertheless, little work was to be had thereafter; Kharms was in and out of
favour at Detgiz and periods of near starvation followed. Kharms and
Vvedensky (the latter had moved to the Ukraine in the mid-30s: see Kharms's
letter to him) survived the main purges of the 1930s. However, the outbreak
of war brought new dangers: Kharms was arrested in Leningrad in August 1941,
while Vvedensky's arrest took place the following month in Kharkov.
Vvedensky died in December of that year and Kharms (it seems of starvation
in prison hospital) in February 1942. Both were subsequently 'rehabilitated'
during the Khrushchev 'Thaw'. Most of their adult writings had to await the
Gorbachev period for publication in Russia. Both starvation and arrest were
anticipated in a number of Kharms's writings. Hunger and poverty were
constant companions; indeed, Kharms can lay claim to being the poet of
hunger (not for nothing did he take strongly to Knut Hamsun's novel of that
name), as the following translation of an unrhyming but rhythmic verse
fragment shows:
This is how hunger begins:
The morning you wake, feeling lively,
Then begins the weakness,
Then begins the boredom;
Then comes the loss
Of the power of quick reason,
Then comes the calmness
And then begins the horror.
On his general situation in life, Kharms wrote the following quatram in
1937:
We've had it now in life's realm,
Of all hope we are now bereft.
Gone are dreams of happiness,
Destitution is all that's left.
The arrest of Kharms came, reportedly, when the caretaker of the block
of flats in which he lived called him down, in his bedroom slippers, 'for a
few minutes'. He was apparently charged with spreading defeatist propaganda;
there is evidence that, even in those times, he managed to clear himself of
this charge, possibly by feigning insanity.
Kharms had been a marked man since his first arrest in 1931 and he was
probably lucky to escape disaster when he landed in trouble over a
children's poem in 1937 (about a man who went out to buy tobacco and
disappeared). In addition, his first wife, Ester Rusakova, was a member of a
well-known old emigre revolutionary family, subsequently purged; it is
intriguing to recall that Kharms had been, for several years, Viktor Serge's
brother-in-law.
___
By the 1930s, Kharms was concentrating more on prose. In addition to
his only then publishable works, his children's stories and verse, he
evolved ('for his drawer') his own idiosyncratic brands of short prose and
dramatic fragment.
Theoretical, philosophical and even mathematical pieces were also
penned, as well as diaries, notebooks and a sizeable body of poetry. The
boundaries between genre are fluid with Kharms, as are distinctions between
fragment and whole, finished and unfinished states. Most of Kharms's
manuscripts were preserved after his arrest by his friend, the philosopher
Yakov Semyonovich Druskin, until they could be safely handed on or deposited
in libraries. It will come as no surprise to readers with the most cursory
inkling of Soviet literary conditions in the 1930s that these writings were
then totally unpublishable -- and indeed that their author is unlikely to
have even contemplated trying to publish them. What is much more surprising
is that they were written at all. From 1962 the children's works of Kharms
began to be reprinted in the Soviet Union. Isolated first publications of a
few of his short humourous pieces for adults followed slowly thereafter, as
did mentions of Kharms in memoirs. Only when Gorbachev's policy of glasnost'
took real effect though, from 1987, did the flood begin, including a major
book-length collection in 1988. Abroad, an awareness of Kharms and the
Oberiuts began to surface in the late 1960s, both in Eastern Europe, where
publication was often easier, and in the West, where a first collection in
Russian appeared in 1974. In 1978 an annotated, but discontinuous, collected
works of Kharms began to appear, published in Bremen by the Verlag K-Presse
(appropriately enough, the 'Kafka Press'), edited from Leningrad. Four
volumes (the poetic opus) have appeared to date. It is probably safe to
assume that virtually all of Kharms's surviving works have now appeared. The
most recent 'find' is a selection of rather mild erotica, largely clinically
voyeuristic and olfactory in nature, which suitably counterpoints certain
tendencies already noticeable in some of Kharms's more mainstream writing.
The English or American reader may have come across some of Kharms's work in
the anthologies published from 1971 by George Gibian (see p. 226). In
addition, scholarly literature on the Oberiuts is growing fast. Kharms
translations have appeared in German and Italian, while the Yugoslav
director Slobodan Pesic has made a surrealistic film, called 'The Kharms
Case'. In Russia Oberiu evenings and Kharms 'mono-spectaculars' have become
commonplace and Moscow News (back in 1988, in its Russian and English issues
alike) was proclaiming Kharms 'an international figure'. In the present age
of post-modernist fragmentation, Kharms's time has surely come.
___
On the assumption that Kharms's published oeuvre may now be more or
less complete (and this may still be a big assumption to make: only in 1992
his puppet play, The Shardam Circus, was published for the first time),
overall assessments of his achievement begin to assume some validity.
Definitive texts from archival sources have, in some instances, replaced
dubious sources. We now know the intended order and content of the
'Incidents' cycle, here presented as a complete entity for the first time in
English. Many of the later examples of Kharms's prose have only come to
light recently, as have notebooks and letters. The prose miniature has long
been a genre more commonly found in Russian literature than elsewhere. Among
the disparate examples that come to mind (many of them by authors very
different from Kharms) we may mention, from the nineteenth century: the
feuilletons of writers such as Dostoevsky, the prose poems of Turgenev and
the shortest works by Garshin and Chekhov; and, from the twentieth, short
pieces by Zamyatin, Olesha and Zoshchenko and, more recently, the aphoristic
writings of Abram Tertz and the prose poems of Solzhenitsyn. In spirit,
Kharms clearly belongs to a tradition of double-edged humour extending from
the word-play and irrelevancy of Gogol and the jaundiced mentality of
Dostoevsky's 'underground' anti-heroes to the intertextual parody of Tertz
and the satirical absurd of Voinovich. Kharms has clear affinities with
certain of the experimental Soviet writings that sprang from a Futurist
Formalist base in the 1920s. In a verse and prose sequence entitled 'The
Sabre' (Sablya of 1929), Kharms singles out for special admiration Goethe,
Blake, Lomonosov, Gogol, Kozma Prutkov and Khlebnikov. In a diary entry of
1937, he lists as his 'favourite writers': Gogol, Prutkov, Meyrink, Hamsun,
Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Such listings are revealing in determining
Kharms's pedigree. On a general European level, Kharms had obvious
affinities with the various modernist, Dadaist, surrealist, absurdist and
other avant-garde movements. Borges wrote brief masterpieces in a rather
different vein. Arguably, Kafka and Beckett provide closer parallels, while
Hamsun and Meyrink furnished Kharms with certain motifs. Some of the
post-modernist and minimalist writings of very recent decades are perhaps
closer than anything else.
'The Old Woman', a story reaching almost epic proportions by Kharms's
standards, has strong claims to be regarded as his masterpiece. A
deceptively multilayered story, this work looks simultaneously back to the
Petersburg tradition of Russian story-telling and forward to the
meta-fictional devices of our post-war era. 'Incidents' signals a
neo-romantic concern with the relationship between the fragment and the
whole (observable too in the theoretical pieces) and, now in its 'complete'
form, it has begun to attract critical interpretation as an entity in
itself. The 'assorted stories', arranged chronologically, indicate the
development of Kharms's idiosyncratic preoccupations over the decade from
the early 1930s. 'Yelizaveta Bam' represents Kharms's contribution to the
theatre of the absurd. The remaining 'non-fictional and assorted writings'
give an idea of Kharms's excursions into other forms of writing.
If Kharms still seems somehow different from all previous models or
comparisons, or more startling, this is perhaps most readily explained by
his constant adoption, at various levels, of what might be termed a poetics
of extremism. Take, for example, his brevity: not for nothing did he note in
his diary that 'garrulity is the mother of mediocrity'. If certain stories
included here (especially some from 'Incidents') seem texts of concise
inconsequentiality, there remain others which incommode the printer even
less: consider, for instance, the following:
"An old man was scratching his head with both hands. In places where he
couldn't reach with both hands, he scratched himself with one, but very,
very fast. And while he was doing it he blinked rapidly."
Another feature of Kharmsian extremism resides in his uncompromising
quest for the means to undermine his own stories, or to facilitate their
self-destruction: there are numerous examples of this in the texts which
follow.
Kharms, then, turns his surgical glance on both the extraordinary world
of Stalin's Russia and on representation, past and present, in story-telling
and other artistic forms. He thus operates, typically, against a precise
Leningrad background. He reflects aspects of Soviet life and its literary
forms, passing sardonic and despairing comment on the period in which he
lived. He also ventures, ludicrously, into historical areas, parodying the
ways in which respected worthies, such as Pushkin, Gogol and Ivan Susanin (a
patriotic hero of 1612) were currently being glorified in print. Certain of
Kharms's miniatures seem strangely anticipatory of modern trends: 'The
Lecture' could almost have been set in politically correct America,
'Myshin's Triumph' smacks of London's cardboard city, and 'On an Approach to
Immortality' would fascinate Kundera.
The most striking feature, for many readers, will be the recurrence of
Kharms's strange and disturbing obsessions: with falling, accidents, chance,
sudden death, victimisation and all forms of apparently mindless violence.
These again are often carried to extremes, or toyed with in a bizarre manner
which could scarcely be unintentional. Frequently there appears little or no
difference between Kharms's avowedly fictional works and his other writings.
In his notebooks can be found such passages as:
"I don't like children, old men, old women and the reasonable
middle-aged. To poison children -- that would be harsh. But, hell, something
needs to be done with them! . . . I respect only young, robust and
splendiferous women. The remaining representatives of the human race I
regard suspiciously. Old women who are repositories of reasonable ideas
ought to be lassoed . . . Which is the more agreeable sight: an old woman
clad in just a shift, or a young man completely naked? And which, in that
state, is the less permissible in public? . . . What's so great about
flowers? You get a significantly better smell from between women's legs.
Both are pure nature, so no one dare be outraged at my words."
How far into the cheek the tongue may go is often far from clear: the
degree of identification with narrator position in Kharms is always
problematic. The Kharmsian obsessions, too, carry over into his notebooks
and diaries:
"On falling into filth, there is only one thing for a man to do: just
fall, without looking round. The important thing is just to do this with
style and energy."
At times the implications might seem sinister, as in the following note
from 1940, which could equally be a sketch for a story, or even, as we have
seen, be a mini-story in itself:
"One man was pursuing another when the latter, who was running away, in
his turn, pursued a third man who, not sensing the chase behind him, was
simply walking at a brisk pace along the pavement."
Sometimes, a diary entry is indeed indistinguishable from a Kharms
miniature:
"I used to know a certain watchman who was interested only in vices.
Then his interests narrowed, and he began to be interested only in one vice.
And so, when he discovered a specialisation of his own within this vice and
began to interest himself only in this one specialisation, he felt himself a
man again. Confidence built up, erudition was required, neighbouring fields
had to be looked into and the man started to develop. This watchman became a
genius."
Other entries rather more predictably affirm what might be supposed to
be his philosophy:
"I am interested only in 'nonsense'; only in that which makes no
practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation."
This last remark was written in 1937, at the height of the purges.
Some or all of this may be approachable, or even explainable, in terms
of psychology, of communication theory, of theory of humour, or indeed with
reference to the nature of surrounding reality: in times of extremity, it is
the times themselves which seem more absurd than any absurd artistic
invention. For that matter, these Kharmsian 'incidents' (on which term, more
below) have their ancestry in a multitude of genres and models: the fable,
the parable, the fairy tale, the children's story, the philosophical or
dramatic dialogue, the comic monologue, carnival, the cartoon and the silent
movie. All of these seem to be present somewhere in Kharms, in compressed
form and devoid of explanation, context and other standard trappings.
Kharms, indeed, seems to serve up, transform or abort the bare bones of the
sub-plots, plot segments and timeless authorial devices of world literature,
from the narratives of antiquity, to classic European fiction, to the
wordplay, plot-play and metafictions characteristic of the postmodern era:
from Satyricon to Cervantes to Calvino. In the modern idiom, theatre of the
absurd and theatre of cruelty apart, Kharms's fictions anticipate in some
primeval way almost everything from the animated screenplay and the strip
cartoon to the video-nasty. Kharms offers a skeletal terseness, as opposed
to the comprehensive vacuousness on offer from many a more conventional
literary form. Once again, it is the environment in which he wrote that is
the most striking thing of all. Kharms, the black miniaturist, is an
exponent not so much of the modernist 'end of the Word' (in a Joycean sense)
as of a post-modernist, minimalist and infantilist 'end of the Story' (in a
sense perhaps most analogous to Beckett). Such a trend is usually taken to
be a post war, nuclear-age cultural phenomenon, exemplified by
fragmentation, breakdown and the impulse to self-destruct. However, the
Holocaust and Hiroshima may well have felt imminent in the Leningrad of the
bleak 1930s.
___
Finally, a word on terminology and arrangement. Many of Kharms's
stories, even beyond the cycle of that name, have been dubbed 'incidents'.
The slightly wider term 'incidences' could equally be used. Kharms, between
1933 and 1937, engaged on a cycle of short prose pieces which he called
Sluchai. The common Russian noun sluchay (masculine, singular) may be
translated, according to context, by a variety of English words: case (cf.
the Italian translation of Kharms, entitled Casi), event, incident,
occurrence, opportunity, occasion or chance. Commentators have at times
labelled the Kharmsian generic innovation: Mini-stories, Happenings or
Cases. 'Mini-stories' is of course descriptive, rather than a translation of
sluchai, just as, say, 'Black Miniatures' would be interpretative;
'Happenings' and 'Cases', I feel, are open to other possible objections.
Hence the term 'Incidents', as used here. Pieces which had not been given a
title by Kharms have generally been called by their first words.
That, as Kharms would say, is all (vsyo!). Now read on!
Clowning decay. Daniil Harms in Perestroika Cinema
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