Super-8 film digitized, Color and black-and-white, 16/9, 47 min, 2017

With : Olga Lukasheva

 

A love story amid texts, images and sounds.

A script – about a man who leaves messages to a woman who never answers – applies captions to interrupt the stream of images taken from Super-8 film reels that were allegedly lost and then found again. An echo effect is created by the presence of sound recordings, which were perhaps also lost and found. Re the images: a bedroom, an apartment, streets, bridges, passersby, meandering through a Russian city, Saint-Petersburg. Re the soundtrack: city-noises, the subway, the street, Orthodox chants.

The title is borrowed from a line by the Russian poet Olga Bergholtz: “Don’t go back there, towards this snow, towards this night, the gaze of someone who awaits you.”

The film is underscored by the motif of fragmentation, and pursues a broader project on bridges, which can architecturally represent language as a bond that separates. The project was launched with the film Invitation to a voyage.