For Biblionight, Garage and Moscow Cinema present a screening of two unique pictures Pushkin's Manscripts and How Mayakovsky Worked – experimental textological dramas that lie on the border between avant-garde cinema and literature studies. The films are introduced by Petr Bagrov, a film scholar famous for popularizing archive cinema.
The short film Pushkin's Manuscripts was created by Sergey Vladimirsky and Anatoly Egorov almost underground and was smuggled onto the screens in 1937 to unexpectedly become one of the most prominent events of Alexander Pushkin's one hundredth anniversary. The whole picture is the dynamic image of the handwritten line filling up the white paper, which brings to mind such classic avant-garde works as Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema. Pushkin's Manuscriptsreconstructs the way Pushkin wrote poems. The viewer witnesses the lines being written and crossed out, rhymes being made up and the canonical text of The Bronze Horseman being brought to life.
How Mayakovsky Worked was made by Viktor Morgenshtern and Fedor Tyapkin 10 years later under the clear influence of Soviet avant-garde and could be considered one of its last great manifestations. Censors accused the film of either Suprematism or Expressionism. Sweeping past the train window, landscapes fuse together into shapeless images, abstract play of light-spots. Within this rhythm, lines of poems appear, metamorphose and fade away.