The Moscow Trials
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Moscow Trials |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | Russian |
| Publishing year | 2014 |
| length | 86 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Milo Rau |
| script | Milo Rau |
| production | Arne Birkenstock |
| camera | Markus Tomsche |
| cut | Lena Rem |
| occupation | |
| |
The Moscow Trials is a 2014 film . The Swiss Milo Rau filmed three Russian criminal proceedings against curators and artists in his court drama .
Content (summary)
Milo Raus The Moscow Trials deals with three Russian criminal proceedings against curators and artists: The court hearings against the exhibitions Attention! Religion! , which alienated religious symbols, and caution art with, for example, the depiction of a crucified Lenin , as well as the process in the context of the so-called punk prayer against the Pussy Riot activists Marija Aljochina , Ekaterina Samuzewitsch and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova .
The film critic Olga Schakin acts as judge, the defense of the artists is formed by the art critic Jekatarina Degot and the lawyer Anna Stavitzkaja, who are also involved in the Attention! Religion and Prohibited Arts who represented the defense. The public prosecutor's office represents Maxim Shevchenko , a well-known television journalist in Russia, together with the lawyer who is critical of the government, Maxim Krupski, a representative of the Memorial human rights center , who was the only actor who did not express his personal opinion. The processes begin with short statements from artists or philosophers. Dimitri Gutow emphasizes the extraordinary nature of the event: this is where harshly hostile opponents come together. The philosopher Mikhail Kuzmich Ryklin mentions a real hate campaign against dangerous modern art in Russia. The core of the presentation is the cross-examination of summoned witnesses by the defense and public prosecutor's office. Three of the lay judges believe the artists to be guilty of “stirring up religious hatred”, three are innocent, and one abstained, so that the trials formally end with the artist's acquittal .
Case "Caution! Religion "(2003)
The exhibition Warning! Religion at the Sakharov Center was dedicated to contemporary art. Opened on January 14, 2003, four days later exhibits by militant Orthodox Christians were damaged or destroyed and the exhibition was closed against the wishes of the artists. On February 12, 2003, the Duma, by majority vote, called on the Russian General Prosecutor's Office to take action against the organizers of the exhibition. Yuri Samodurov , the director of the Sakharov Center and the main defendant, waived a civil suit against the intruders because of the damage, but this meant that the museum's lawyers were not allowed to enter the courtroom. Defenders were the human rights activists Alexander Podrabinek , Lev Ponomarjow , Evgeni Ichlow and Sergei Kovalev . Samodurov and the employee responsible for exhibitions, Lyudmila Vasilovskaya, were sentenced on March 28, 2005 to a fine of 100,000 rubles each, and a co-defendant had committed suicide.
Case "Forbidden Art" (2006)
Lyudmila Vasilovskaya, organizer of the exhibition Beware of Religion! , as well as Yuri Samodurow and Andrei Erofejew , were indicted in 2006 and 2010 under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
Case "Pussy Riot" (2010)
Yekaterina Stanislawowna Samuzewitsch represented her fellow campaigners Marija Aljochina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who had only been pardoned at the end of December 2012. For her part, she made it clear that the performance in the cathedral was intended to be a protest against the “ clerical state” under Putin, not an attack on the feelings of believers.
background
The film was shot in the Sakharov Center in Moscow and the court hearings were re-enacted by Russian citizens: lawyers, a constitutional judge, as well as witnesses and experts who represent different political points of view. The cross-interrogations , pleadings and expert reports presented a disturbing picture of today's Russia, including orthodox fanatics who speak of the "plague of neoliberalism ". The Russian Orthodox priest Gleb Jakunin said about the action by Pussy Riot that although it had hurt his feelings, "it is more important that the cheeky women make the lewd copulation of the Russian state power with the church visible".
It is not a simple re-enactment , i.e. not a description of historical events that is as accurate as possible - the director determined the framework, but he left the course of the negotiation to his protagonists. At the beginning of the film, Milo Rau explains, “To show what the processes could have looked like if they had actually taken place according to the rule of law in the country. If they had not been used to intimidate voices critical of the state and the church. "
The title of the film is reminiscent of the Moscow trials between 1936 and 1938, show trials from the early days of the Great Terror under Stalin , with which he got rid of the “old guard” of the Bolsheviks , who still came from Lenin's supporters, and thus his own Autonomy secured.
The staging and shooting took place in Moscow from March 1st to 3rd, 2013, but was interrupted on March 3rd, 2013 by Russian officials and Orthodox believers: “We were informed that an event to protect Pussy Riot is taking place here and that the Orthodox Church is being criticized ”- scenes that mark the beginning of the film. Otherwise, the protagonists can be seen in the courtroom in the film, interrupted by short excerpts from interviews with witnesses at the court hearings.
Shooting disrupted in the Sakharov Center
Filming in the Sakharov Center in Moscow was interrupted several times on March 3, 2013. The Swiss director Milo Rau had to identify himself to officials in the uniform of the Russian immigration authorities, and his visa papers were checked. The lawyer Anna Stavitskaja played the role of a defense attorney in Rau's production; She is said to have contributed with “her professional subtlety and her negotiating skills” to the fact that the immigration officials withdrew. After a break of about two hours, the work continued, but shortly afterwards some men stormed into the room. The group sat down on the spectator's bench, followed the action and left the hall after a few minutes. In the meantime, several police vehicles had appeared in front of the building, but they also withdrew. Maxim Shevchenko, a well-known state-compliant television journalist and the prosecution's theater expert in the feature film, is said to have had a de-escalating and calming effect on the police officers.
Emergence
At the invitation of Milo Rau, one hundred invited guests attended the Sakharov Center from March 1st to 3rd, 2013, along with the actors. Within three days, the “three processes were not re-enacted, but re-rolled out, as a show process with an open outcome.” As a director, Rau selected the participants, but did not provide any texts or even define the roles and characters. On the other hand, he hired seven lay judges, who were to form a cross-section of Moscow society, from strictly orthodox beekeepers to liberal owners of a photo studio. The Sakharov Center served as a simulated courtroom, and the jury had to judge “whether the two exhibitions and the appearance of Pussy Riot at all fall within the field of criminal law , whether the artists intended to insult believers and what the art is in Russia is allowed. ”The production in the Sakharov Center was recorded with cameras for filmic post-production and was simultaneously shown as a live recording to the invited artists and journalists.
Raus Dokumentarfilm celebrated its German premiere on March 18, 2014 as part of the Lit.Cologne in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne , and since March 20, 2014, Die Moskauerverfahren has been shown in German cinemas on distribution by RealFictionFilme .
Reviews
“The mood on the screen is so aggressive and hateful that the feeling spreads that this film is not taking place in our present, but in a time when nationalism , chauvinism , racism , homophobia and intolerance were part of the good social tone. But what could be seen on Wednesday in the cinema of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne is not a story from the 19th century, but a bitter piece of contemporary history ... Milo Rau's film-game takes no position. He tries to capture opinions and moods, to put positions against each other in order to make them accessible to a broad public. It is a shortcoming of the film that it is not always clear who is playing which role - or who is not. The fact that real state power appears during the shooting under the pretext of checking passports shows once again what an enlightening role art can play. "
“In sometimes sharp, sometimes turbulent debates, especially between the unfortunately overwhelmed judge and the devilishly good, intimidatingly vicious Maxim Shevchenko, it quickly became clear that these“ Moscow trials ”concern the core of Russian society: their obviously unresolved identity. The conflicts that affect the relationship between church and state, art and religion came to light with great clarity. Why is modern art needed? Are religious feelings more worth protecting than the feelings of artists? Should the state be neutral in matters of art? What are the values of the Russian nation? As a Western observer, one could sometimes get the impression of witnessing a premodern fundamental dispute. The Russian constitution ensures freedom of speech and expression and defines the separation of state and church, but is apparently just a piece of paper without validity in reality ... Milo Rau has achieved something very rare with his project: He has become a form of political Installation art found that frees itself from superficial pedagogy. For him, unlike often in political theater, the stage is not a moral institution, but an intellectual one in the best sense of the word: It takes both the participants and the audience seriously as self-thinkers ... Milo Rau's extremely clever art was the main winner. It is complicated in many different ways. "
“In this scene in Milo Rau's film, fiction and reality collide most clearly: The Cossacks, organized in conservative-religious vigilante groups, are actually at the door and believe that they are dealing with an art campaign critical of the church. But her appearance in the film is not planned, nor is that of the Russian migration authority, whose employees burst into the courtroom beforehand and wanted to know whether the Swiss who organized everything here also has the necessary papers ... Much more important than that Judgment in the film - a narrow acquittal - is the insight into Russian society and its relationship to religion and authority that Rau grants. A society that is not only three-fourths Russian Orthodox, but has been trauma with it since everything religious was forbidden in the Soviet era and a censorship agency eliminated “anti-Soviet propaganda”, including in art - and now or anyway precisely for this reason, in search of authority, turns to the Church. "
“The Swiss theater maker Milo Rau has found a fascinating way of making the» Russian discourse «visible in a concentrated form. […] Interestingly, none of the actors in Raus Film invokes the freedom of art. Rather, the art advocates want to show that their intentions were "harmless". A strangely toothless argument against the squad of more or less charismatic "experts" who sense the danger of "liberal fascism" in the Pussy Riot appearance or who draw hair-raising comparisons to Stalin's anti-religious policy. The arguments are so crude - and apparently so powerful (which is shown not least by the group of self-appointed Cossacks who occasionally want to storm the hall to protect the fatherland) - you have to watch this film to believe it is possible. "
Web links
- The Moscow trials in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Moscow Trials on realfictionfilme.de
- Press comments on The Moscow Trials on the producer's homepage
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b The Moscow Trials . filmstarts.de. Retrieved March 25, 2014.
- ↑ a b c d e f g realfictionfilme.de: The Moscow Trials . March 20, 2014. Retrieved March 25, 2014.
- ↑ a b c Frida Thurm: The Moscow Trials - Putin against Pussy Riot 1: 1 . Time online . March 18, 2014. Retrieved March 23, 2014.
- ↑ a b c d Dirk Pilz: The «Moscow Trials»: Society in front of the court . Neue Zürcher Zeitung . March 5, 2013. Retrieved March 25, 2014.
- ↑ Dirk Pilz, author of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, was one of the invited journalists in the Sakharov Center from March 1st to 3rd, 2013.
- ↑ Michail Ryklin : With the right of the strong. Russian culture in times of “managed democracy” . Suhrkamp Verlag , ISBN 3-518-12472-2 .
- ↑ a b c d e Cheeky women and fornication . The world . March 23, 2014. Accessed March 23, 2014.
- ^ A b Christine Wahl: Pussy Riot: Disturbance of the process theater piece in Moscow . The daily mirror . March 3, 2013. Accessed March 24, 2014.
- ^ Barbara Schweizerhof: The Moscow Trials. epd film, February 18, 2014, accessed April 16, 2015 .