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A few years ago Godard started a one-man business recycling new film footage, historical material, video snapshots, his own letter jokes, philosophical reasonings, sociological analyses and high-level political twaddle in a remarkable way. In his alchemical laboratory he laid a Russian egg this time, which he himself, flanked by a collection of matrushka dolls, hatched, while inhaling steam bent over a pan of water with a red jersey over his head. He passes very individual comment on highly topical matters in the Empire of the Rusted Iron Curtain, which he illustrates aptly using a highly varied collection of heavyweights from his audio-visual archives. From the first shot (an old black and white sequence of an operator putting a bobbin on the unwinding reel plus a scene in colour of a single-engined airplane - a Piper, pronounced in the French way - taxying on the grass landing strip) a characteristic hotchpotch of references, allusions and alliterations follows, all having two things in common: Russia and Godard! This 'essai d'investigation cinématographique', based on the subtitle of Solzshenitsyn's literary search for the Gulag Archipelago, makes use of performances of top athletes and Bolshoi ballet dancers, a text on Tolstoy writing 'Anna Karenina', a ceremonial portrait of a group of people's commissars, a plaque dedicated to Felix D., founder of the Tsheka and clips from classic films by Eisenstein. This is interspersed with scenes from feature films in the well-known, emotional and a-logical Godard style. Notable is the actor who has to say a sentence, "If I want to be famous/popular, I ...", while delicate nuances are prompted by Godard. Convincing and compelling 'KINO-ILLUSION'.
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Erik Daams
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Production: Television Suisse Romande
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