Yevgeniy Fiks, “Moving Icons”

Alexander Rubchenko, “These Twenty Cans of Chunky
Beef Soup Could Easily Pass for Advance Wages in Siberian Verkhoyansk”

Andra Ursuta-Rozin, “20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup”

Elena Sorokina, “Reality Passion”

Alexander Shnurov, “Suprematists”

Anna Genova, “Recipe for Happiness”

Alexander Genis, “Vasya” Russian Van Gogh

----------------------------------------------------

Alexander Rubchenko / “These Twenty Cans of Chunky Beef Soup Could Easily Pass for Advance Wages in Siberian Verkhoyansk”

"20 Cans Of Chunky Beef Soup", a documentary co-produced by Yuriy Gavrilenko and Slava Solganik, is a classically Russian peculiarity, which situates the past purport of a "Tom Thumb"-like character in the present, and purveys certain vociferations on deviant Russians, who dwell in the highly-conceptualized, mediated and generally obfuscated "salad bowl" of ethnicities in New York City.Though the video appropriates the form of an ordeal and the viewing experience is somewhat stultifying due to a trivial take on being "homeless by choice", it never degenerates into a sententious, didactic warning sign of the capacity to kill with kindness that is implicit in any idealized citizenry. Instead the video leaves you with a tangible dose of perplexity.The sauntering camera cuts capers and tricks alongside protagonist Max Vokhmin as he demonstrates his elaborate techniques for surviving in Lower Manhattan.The city appears to be a "non-permissive environment", populated by street-dwellers with unsound minds and inclement law enforcement zealots animated by promises of a forthcoming improvement in the "quality of life".

Shackled with a dozen porn magazines in Tompkins Square Park, or sporting a turfed-out club jacket, with everything else incumbent on the look missing, Max navigates between legendary locations while alternately engaging the audienceís sympathy (for his financial woes) or malaise.

Had he remained in his home city, Moscow, perhaps he would be seen in the midst of the pauperized, reform-ravaged intelligentsia, idling like an epicure on a bench inStrastnoy Boulevard.Over here, having survived two drug-induced comas and having been nearly crushed by an out-of-control correctional facility bus, Max sees himself as blessed to pursue his derelictions in his own dogmatic way.Yet the depiction of Max is so novelistic and nuanced that the video might better be viewed as a psycho-ontological map of his mind, a mind transfixed by experiences with clinical death, a mind dedicated to pursuing the completely un- or impractical, that strives to break away from drab subsistence.

Congruently the story itself adopts the dynamics of recurring, cyclical relationships of old and new, reaching a saturation point, an abrupt awareness- like when you have just experienced a truly liberating dream and in the aftermath feel a pang of contrition over not having been adventurous enough in that other semblance of reality.

Previous Article
Next Article