Images of the end of the world in films by Alexander Sokurov, Konstantin Lopushansky, Andrei Tarkovsky, and other Russian directors.
Soviet science fiction in the fields of literature and cinema is closely linked to the ideological paradigms of its time. The first postrevolutionary works were futurist satellites of state aspirations for an endless horizon of possibilities opening up for the society of the future thanks to scientific thought and technological progress. Konstantin Paustovsky, who was a witness to this unpredictable and boundless era, called it The Dawn of an Uncertain Age in his multi-volume autobiography The Story of a Life.
After World War II the romance and unreserved optimism of such works began to be replaced by cautious critical realism. The next phase, during the Thaw period, involved the ethical debates of the "physicists" and censure of the technocratic view by the "lyricists", which brought faith in the innocence of science toward its end.
Science fiction also changed. It became the bearer of a searching and anti-utopian view of the possibilities of human thought and a realization that humans bear responsibility for their ideas and achievements. The high point of these doubts was the anxiety revealed in various scenarios for the end of the world. The Cold War, the Era of Stagnation, and the approaching break-up of the Soviet state, with all of its "constructions of the century", only increased authors’ immersion in apocalyptic fatalism and hopelessness. The collapse of the USSR and its consequences were accompanied by films that openly reflected the decline of great hopes and became the logical conclusion of the evolution of Soviet sci-fi.
A number of these films will be shown in Garage Auditorium as part of the program The End of an Unknown Era. First is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the main Soviet sci-fi film of the late 1970s and early 1980s that is a despair-laced screen adaptation of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Another important film in the program, which is also connected to the idea of a zone where dreams or curses come true, is the family drama The Third Planet by Aleksandr Rogozhkin.
The philosophical dominant of the program comes from Tarkovsky follower Konstantin Lopushansky’s Dead Man’s Letters and A Visitor to a Museum. These films provide masterfully constructed images of life after "the end of the world", after the history of humankind as we know it, when the architecture of the past and solitary intellectuals in search of meaning are all that remains. Alexander Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse continues the overarching theme of history taking a new turn. It tells the story of an attempt to save people who seem to have gone beyond the temporal dimension. The program concludes with the grandiose three-hour-long work Hard to Be a God by Aleksei German, which was first conceived in 1968. A dark story of the Middle Ages on another planet based on the eponymous novel by the Strugatsky brothers, it was only released after the director’s death.
These screenings coincide with the sci-fi writing workshop The Roadsides of the Times: Starlight Seen for the Last Time, a joint project by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and GES-2 House of Culture.
